Review: Aftersun

Image courtesy of A24.

Charlotte Wells' debut, "Aftersun," is a film that I could appreciate more once it was over and I had some time to reflect on it - which is appropriate, considering that the movie itself is a looking back, of sorts, on a trip taken some years before by a young girl and her father. In other words, this is a movie about regret and the things we can only see in hindsight, rather than at the time of their occurrence.

In the film, 11-year-old Sophie (Frankie Corio) is taking a trip with her father, Calum (Paul Mescal), to Turkey, and the film's first half mostly details the smalls odds and ends of their daily routines, although some glimpses of things that Sophie missed as a girl but recognizes as an adult - her father taking some solace in a solitary dance on a balcony while smoking, a Tai Chai book, a story about her father's childhood, and a pained look on his face when Sophie mentions that she knows he can't afford the snorkel mask she carelessly lost - begin to come into focus.

Calum's sadness later is more pronounced but - interestingly enough - away from the focus of Sophie, who doesn't narrate the film so much as recall it as a series of memories. During one scene, Calum cries alone in the hotel room where they're staying. During another, he walks into the sea, and we wonder if he'll return.

Interspersed with these scenes - which, based on the music by Los Del Rio and Chumbawumba, are set in the late 1990s - are a series of sequences that only make sense when the film is seen as a whole. A grown Sophie - now living with a woman and apparently a mother - dreams that she is in a strobe-lit nightclub where she sees Calum dancing. She tries to approach multiple times, but when she finally reaches him, well, I won't give that away. 

Suffice it to say, it punctuates what the rest of the film has been getting at: Adult Sophie is reliving that trip with her father in her head, wondering why she didn't see the sadness that was engulfing him, and trying to reconcile the man she thought she knew then with the one she obviously didn't know at all. 

The final moments of the picture - which piece together two dance scenes, both set to Queen and David Bowie's "Under Pressure" - are fairly piercing and effective, which makes it slightly frustrating that the first half of the film took so long to get where it's going. The picture's early scenes have a lethargic rhythm, and the dialogue is often muffled by the characters' surroundings. 

"Aftersun" eventually reaches its destination and powerfully drives home the points it wants to make, but it takes a little more time than is necessary in doing so, and the film's second half feels infinitely more effective than its first. So, while I wasn't taken with it quite as much as most others have been, I appreciate how it causes the viewer to reflect on how likely it was that their own parents were still figuring things out when they - the viewer, that is - were children, much as Calum clearly is here. 

And I appreciated how some of the film's most intimate scenes - there's a particularly heartbreaking one in which Calum pleads with his daughter to always tell him about her experiences, no matter how bad they are, and we get the sense that she did not do so - are shot from a distance as if to give the characters privacy. "Aftersun" may take a little time to grow on you, but it'll likely stick with you after it's over.