Aftersun (2022). Courtesy A24.
Sophie turns the video camera on her father and asks him a question. Calum can joke, move away or try to steer the conversation somewhere easier. On holiday, it is a game between them. In Aftersun, the recording also becomes something his daughter can return to years later, when the same pause or expression might mean something she could not have understood at eleven.
Charlotte Wells's 2022 debut follows Sophie, played by Frankie Corio, and her father Calum, played by Paul Mescal, at a Turkish resort in the late 1990s. They swim, share a room and negotiate the small disappointments of a package holiday. Their familiarity comes through in everyday movements: applying cream, leaning against each other and deciding how to spend the afternoon.
In a note published by A24 for the film's release, Wells described its perspective as that of an adult Sophie looking back roughly twenty years. She also made an important distinction about her own involvement. The film draws upon personal feelings and a photograph of her and her father in Turkey, but it remains fiction. Calum is not a documentary subject whose life the audience can solve.
The camcorder gives that uncertainty a visible form. Wells told Sight and Sound that it had not always been part of the script. She liked the way it turned looking into a game and allowed Calum to see how Sophie saw him. Recorded footage preserves a face or a gesture, while everything outside the frame remains unavailable. Growing older gives Sophie different questions to ask of the same images.
Mescal lets Calum's care for his daughter sit beside moments of withdrawal. He can make her laugh without being able to explain what is troubling him. Corio keeps Sophie occupied by her own discoveries and frustrations, as a child on holiday would be. The audience sometimes notices a hesitation that does not stop her day. The closeness between them makes those differences in attention more painful.
Wells gives the holiday time to feel like a holiday before asking us to reconsider its fragments. A room, a pool or a song can be remembered clearly without explaining the person who was there. Aftersun holds onto Sophie's affection as her understanding changes. The recordings let her look at Calum again, but they cannot turn every unanswered question into a conversation.
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