Love is the single greatest emotion human beings have the luxury of experiencing, and loss is the unfortunate and inevitable circumstance of indulging in that high. Every now and then, there comes a movie that holds the audience's heart like a piece of fragile glass and then exploits that fragility, shattering it into a hundred tiny pieces. Charlotte Wells’ heartbreaking debut feature film Aftersun tenderly explores the abstraction of human memory when it simultaneously juggles feelings of love and heartache. Her ability to capture emotions long considered uncontainable by the medium of film with such precision and skill makes Aftersun a cinematic masterpiece.
A fictional translation loosely based on Wells’ experiences, Aftersun dissects the relationship dynamics between young father Callum (Paul Mescal) and 11-year-old Sophie (Frankie Corio) as they embark on what is implied to be the last trip the two take together. The film’s slow meditation in examining the regrets and apprehensions that haunt Callum as his life approaches its end contrasted with the vibrant and exciting beginning of a long life for his daughter Sophie is explosively restrained.
Through haunting and quietly loving home footage that replays like a distant memory, questions of how much we really know about our parents begin to stir. The dream-like daze through which Sophie remembers her father and her last trip with him in Turkey challenges the intangibility of the connection she creates with him, especially when the lingering effects of such a strong bond seem so tangible.
Separated from Sophie’s mother and barely scraping by from paycheck to paycheck, Calum’s frustration with a life that has slipped past his grasp is portrayed gut-wrenchingly by Paul Mescal. Doubling-over in pain, a bleeding hand pressed onto by a towel, Calum continues to amuse his daughter with cryptic answers, masking his suffering, and cleverly dodging any personal questions that teeter on having to reflect back on his life. Mescal’s pained expressions, hesitant corrections of people’s assumptions of his relationship to Sophie, and his melancholic release of emotions is visceral and profoundly moving.
The silent inner-turmoil captured through multiple long shots of Calum smoking, dancing, and swaying, cut beside moments of complete joy in Turkey is a striking encapsulation of how we can love and still feel broken. Mescals undeniable talent oozes in his quiet suffering in muttered declarations that he didn't think he would make it to age thirty, conveying the hurt of having to start living for someone else at such a young age because it often means a complete erasure of your own identity.
These moments of deep sadness that Calum experiences are largely seen through Sophie’s perspective and are thus muddled with confusion, fear, and a deep intimacy that is rooted in worry. Corrio’s brilliant translation of innocence, charisma and youth on-screen is intoxicating. Her lovability makes the implied ill-fated ending of the two’s relationship all the more painful to endure since the chemistry Mescal and Corrio strike is palpable.
Cinematographer Gregory Oke’s unconventional framing choices, often placing the characters in conversation off-screen with a small glimpse of them through reflective surfaces, contains the characters in this fuzzy-memory of Sophie’s. The collision of bodies and the careful avoidance of them captured in beautiful, close, tight shots is absolutely freeing. Editor Blair McClendon’s intentional yet masterfully masked cuts mimics the weathering of time — offering brush strokes of significant moments in Sophie’s life that have survived the wrath of frail human memory. McClendon inserts in great frequency a scene of an uninhibited Calum dancing in a club, strobe lights engulfing his surroundings. The odd and sudden repetitive placement of this scene is confusing and distortive at first but later becomes the bearer of immense significance as the final shot of the film comes around. The technical achievement of Aftersun is undeniable by the time the credits roll. Every shot and every cut is motivated by emotion. The intentionality behind every aspect of this film drives the post-credit-emotional-damage the audience will experience.
Wells creates a film that is unlike anything we have seen before. It transcends the bounds of cinema and caresses the deep cuts it makes with salt. Aftersun is a special movie that freezes time to paint a portrait of a father at the lowest point in his life. The awareness that what unfolds on-screen are the last moments shared between him and his daughter is deeply hurtful. Yet, the film showers its characters with empathy by painting the father-daughter relationship, not as an example of irresponsible parenting, but as a continued pouring of love even when you have none left to give, and there is nothing that can quite shatter your fragile heart like that.