Aftersun is a film about a daughter watching holiday footage to understand a father she lost. The footage cannot show her what she is looking for. That is the argument the film is making. It is also the argument the film cannot quite make about itself.
Sophie points the camcorder at her father and tells him she wants to interview him. He deflects, he jokes, he turns the lens back at her, he eventually says no. “Fine,” she says, “I’ll just record it in my little mind camera.”
She doesn’t know what she’s said. She’s eleven. The line is funny and a little sad and she moves on immediately because she is eleven and the holiday is still happening and there is a pool. But the line is also the most precise thing anyone says in Aftersun, because it names what the film is: Sophie’s mind camera. The footage in the camcorder shows what Calum let her film. The film shows what Sophie has made out of it twenty years later, alone in her apartment, watching the tapes at an hour that suggests she does this a lot.
A.O. Scott of The New York Times called Aftersun “astonishing and devastating” and wrote that Charlotte Wells was “very nearly reinventing the language of film, unlocking the medium’s often dormant potential to disclose inner worlds of consciousness and feeling.” He was right to be astonished. He was right about the devastation. What the praise cannot quite attend to — what the film’s precision and formal beauty actively prevents anyone from looking at for long — is what the mind camera does to the footage it is processing.
Aftersun, written and directed by Wells and released in 2022, is her feature debut. It stars Paul Mescal as Calum, a Scottish man of thirty-one who takes his eleven-year-old daughter Sophie (Frankie Corio) on a holiday to a Turkish resort. Sophie’s parents are separated; she lives with her mother; this is one of their regular but infrequent stretches of time together. The film is intercalated: DV camcorder footage that Sophie took during the trip, reconstructed present-tense scenes of the same holiday shot in the film’s own cinematography, and sequences of adult Sophie — glimpsed in a rave, in darkness, across strobe light — trying to reach her father through the crowd. The film makes explicit that adult Sophie is the one watching the tapes, the one constructing the memory. It was ranked first on Sight and Sound‘s poll of the best films of 2022. Paul Mescal received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor.
| Director | Charlotte Wells |
|---|---|
| Year | 2022 |
| Runtime | 101 minutes |
| Cast | Paul Mescal, Frankie Corio, Celia Rowlson-Hall |
| Awards | BAFTA Outstanding Debut; Oscar nomination Best Actor (Mescal); Sight and Sound Film of the Year 2022 |
| Streaming | MUBI, Paramount+ |
Calum is suffering. This is the film’s central fact, delivered not through declaration but through accumulation: the self-help books in his pile of holiday reading, the cast on his wrist whose origin is never explained, the moment he tells a diving instructor he is surprised to have made it to thirty-one, the eyes that glaze while he smiles at his daughter, the night he is found crying alone in the hotel room while Sophie sleeps. The film arranges these details so that we — watching as adults who know what depression looks like and who have been told by the film’s own structure that this man will be lost — read every scene retroactively. We watch Calum put sunscreen on Sophie’s back and understand it as the act of a man who is here now and knows he may not be later. We watch him dance with her on the last night and hear Freddie Mercury sing “this is our last dance” and understand it as a farewell.
“Sophie’s camcorder captured what Calum chose to give her. The film’s editing gave her everything he didn’t. She will watch the footage forever. She will never find in it what wasn’t there when it was shot.”
But here is what the film cannot hold still long enough to look at. Eleven-year-old Sophie did not read these moments the way the film reads them. She experienced them as her father being her father. The self-help books were just books in a holiday pile. The cast was on his wrist and she probably asked about it and accepted whatever he said. The moment he said he was surprised to have made it to thirty-one was, to an eleven-year-old, an adult saying a slightly strange thing that didn’t require interpretation. Children do not continuously read their parents for signs of suicidal ideation. They live inside the holiday.
The film knows this. The gap between what Sophie knew then and what she knows now is announced as the film’s explicit subject. The editing — which places the rave sequences, the strobe light, the adult Sophie in the dark alongside the ordinary holiday footage — is the formal evidence of this gap. The film is not pretending Sophie understood at the time. It is showing her trying, twenty years later, to retroactively understand.
What the film cannot acknowledge is that the footage cannot help her. This is the wall the film mistakes for a window. The DV camera captured exactly what Calum let it capture: a father on holiday with his daughter, present, loving, there. The suffering that the film gives us — the glazed eyes, the mystery of the cast, the diverted interview — is in the film’s own editing, not in the footage. Wells added it. Sophie’s adult knowledge added it. The footage itself is sunscreen and pool games and Calum turning the lens back on his daughter because he doesn’t want to be seen.
Adult Sophie will watch these tapes for the rest of her life. She will watch Calum apply sunscreen to her back and think: he knew. She will watch him dance with her and think: he was saying goodbye. But the Calum who knew, the Calum who was saying goodbye — that Calum is not in the footage. He is in what Wells constructed around the footage. He is in the rave, in the strobe, in the sequences that are openly Sophie’s imagination rather than the record of what happened. The footage shows her a father who concealed his suffering well enough that his eleven-year-old daughter had a good holiday. The mind camera added everything else.
The comparison with All of Us Strangers — reviewed in the previous post — is the sharpest thing this sequence of reviews has generated. Both films are an adult’s attempt to reach backward through time to a parent they could not hold. Both films construct an image of the parent from fragments. But Haigh’s film knows it is writing the conversation it needs, and gives Adam’s parents the lines he needed them to say. Wells’s film presents itself as trying to find what was there. The tragedy is that the closer Sophie looks at the footage, the more clearly she is seeing not what the footage contains but what she has made of it. The two films are not, finally, mirror images. They are the same act viewed from different directions: Haigh builds the parent from imagination. Wells tries to find the parent in the record. Both come back to the same place. The parent is not there. The act of looking is the grief, not its resolution.
Wells has said the film is “emotionally autobiographical” — her feelings, not her facts. She has also made a short film called Tuesday about her own father’s death. The distance between the facts of that loss and the fiction of this film is the space inside which Aftersun was made. Sophie is not Charlotte. Calum is not Wells’s father. And yet: the same act of watching old footage and trying to find the man who is gone, trying to understand what the record contains that could not be seen at the time, trying to close the gap between eleven-year-old knowledge and adult knowledge — this is what the film is. This is what the film cannot show you, because to show it would be to break the dream that the footage can deliver the father back.
Sophie films Calum on the balcony. He takes the camera from her and films her instead. For a moment they are both behind cameras, filming each other, neither of them seeing the other clearly, both of them trying. The footage of that moment — the footage of them both trying — is the closest the film gets to what it cannot say: that looking was always what they had, and it was never quite enough, and she has been looking ever since.
If this stayed with you, watch these next:
All of Us Strangers (Andrew Haigh, 2023): reviewed in the previous post and the film Aftersun is most precisely in dialogue with — both are an adult trying to reconstruct a parent across an unbridgeable gap, but where Haigh writes the parent from imagination, Wells tries to find the parent in the record. Placed together, the two films complete each other’s argument.
The Souvenir (Joanna Hogg, 2019): a film that also reconstructs a relationship through memory from a position of adult knowledge the protagonist did not have at the time, and that is equally honest about the distortions the act of reconstruction creates. The comparison asks whether understanding always arrives too late to be useful, and what we make of it anyway.
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