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Aftersun (M, 101 mins) Directed by Charlotte Wells *****
In the present day, more or less, Sophie is watching old video of scenes from a holiday she took with her dad, 20 years before. The shots play out in the palette of sun-bleached postcards from a family album.
Sophie was 11 on that holiday. Dad Calum was about to turn 31. They travelled to Turkey as part of a bus tour. The resort they had been booked into was still mostly a construction site, but with a beach not too far away.
Calum and Sophie’s mum are no longer together, but we gather they are very amicably separated. It dawns on us pretty quickly just how young these people must have been, when they became parents.
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Aftersun is the debut feature from Scottish writer-director Charlotte Wells. Wells has three acclaimed short films on her résumé. One of which, Tuesday, she has cited as the foundations of Aftersun.
At times, the holiday videos fill the screen and we are immersed in that long-ago week. In the present, Sophie is looking for answers, we guess, but also reliving the time and recalibrating her memories of her dad. Wells’ script is far too canny and strong to ever to tell us what to think, but Aftersun is very much about the ways in which memories slip and elide – and can come to represent quite different events to the ones we might have been aware of at the time.
A24
Scottish writer-director Charlotte Wells won the Bafta for Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director or Producer for Aftersun.
All of which risks making Aftersun sound like heavy-going, when it is no such thing. Aftersun is a bright, funny, immensely likeable and touching film.
Newcomer Frankie Corio is astonishing as young Sophie, perfectly capturing that state of “not a little kid anymore”, but still awed and slightly intimidated by the teenagers at the hotel pool. Her Sophie is sensitive to her dad’s occasional evasions and shadows, even if she cannot put into words quite what she is seeing and hearing.
As Calum, Paul Mescal is worth every inch of the Oscar nomination he has earned for his work here. There is nothing flashy or attention seeking about his Calum – which is why Mescal probably won’t win – but as we start to comprehend what Mescal is communicating from within Calum’s trying-to-be-happy-go-lucky persona, then the subtlety and the piercing accuracy of Mescal’s performance might make itself more clear to you.
As Sophie moves towards adolescence, we wonder whether Calum can ever leave his own adolescence behind. Some of what Mescal does here, only really hit me days after I first watched Aftersun. And I’ve seen it three times now.
Supplied
Aftersun will be one of the very best films you see this year. It is a gem, anchored by a pair of lead performances that will leave you feeling you have met these people.
Aftersun is a film of assurance and confidence. Wells and her editor have constructed an immersive, engrossing and easy-to-follow narrative, that still occasionally plays as something dream-like and rhapsodic.
Short scenes of Calum in his nightclubbing days, surely around the time Sophie came into existence, play against scenes of the adult Sophie in the same loud, dizzying spaces. But even these nightmarish moments could just as easily be recollections of real nights, with all the unreality that a night out in the 1990s – or the 2010s – could hold.
The music, as you might expect, is absolutely perfect. Even a vocal-forward mix of Queen and David Bowie’s Under Pressure – a song I thought must have exhausted its potential for soundtrack inclusion by now – sounds wonkily anthemic and appropriately disorientating.
Supplied
Frankie Corio and Paul Mescal are simply superb as daughter and father Sophie and Calum in Aftersun.
Aftersun will be one of the very best films you see this year. It is a gem, anchored by a pair of lead performances that will leave you feeling you have met these people. And they will stay in your memory for a long, long time.
After advance previews tomorrow (Wednesday), Aftersun will screen in select cinemas from February 23.
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