Aftersun, and the Ache of a Remembered Holiday

01Memory as Method

There is a moment in Aftersun when Sophie, eleven years old and filming with a camcorder on a Turkish package holiday, turns the lens on her father Calum and asks him what he thought his life would look like at thirty-one. He laughs, deflects, says something gentle and evasive. She keeps filming. The camera holds. And in that gap between what is said and what is felt, Charlotte Wells locates the whole film — a sustained, aching meditation on what we notice too late about the people we love.

Wells wrote the script from a place of personal excavation: Aftersun is drawn, loosely, from her own childhood memories of a holiday with her father. That autobiographical pressure shows not as indulgence but as discipline. Every scene earns its weight through restraint. There are no revelations, no dramatic confrontations, no tidy disclosure of what is wrong with Calum. There is only the accumulation of small, half-noticed things: the way he stares at the sea in the middle of the night, the bruise Sophie glimpses on his arm, the way he learns a tai chi routine alone on a balcony at dawn, moving slowly, as if practising the act of staying in his own body.

Paul Mescal plays Calum, and it is one of the finest pieces of screen acting in recent British film: guarded, warm, funny, and quietly unravelling all at once. He and Frankie Corio, as Sophie, generate a chemistry of complete ease — the shorthand of a parent and child who spend rare but precious time together. Corio, a non-professional when cast, carries the film's observational intelligence on her face without ever seeming to perform. Wells shoots their dynamic with a naturalism that feels almost documentary: handheld camerawork, ambient sound, the blurring grain of DV footage intercutting with 35mm as adult Sophie, years later, watches the holiday recordings back and tries to reconstruct the father she did not fully know.

02The Film as Act of Witness

That formal conceit — present-tense 35mm memories against the degraded texture of camcorder footage — is central to what makes Aftersun so precise in its emotional effect. The DV grain signals the limits of memory itself: we are watching material that has been compressed, copied, lost in transfer. The film is not asking us to experience the holiday as it was but as it survives, in fragments, in a daughter's grief-stricken retrospective gaze. By the time the film ends with a prolonged, strobe-lit dance sequence — adult Sophie and young Calum glimpsed through flashing darkness, reaching for a connection that can no longer be made — Wells has turned a package holiday into a philosophical inquiry into how we mourn the living and the dead alike.

The Turkish resort, all sunbeds and evening entertainment and karaoke, is rendered without irony or condescension. Wells is not satirising the budget holiday; she is inside it. The ordinariness is the point. These are the unremarkable settings in which families do the most significant, least remarked-upon work of knowing each other — and failing to. Sofia Exarchou's production design and Gregory Oke's cinematography give the film a washed-out beauty that never tips into postcard aesthetics. This is Mediterranean light as it actually falls on peeling shoulders and chlorinated hair, not as a travel supplement imagines it.

The film's score, by Oliver Coates, works in and around the era's pop — Queen's Under Pressure, Blur's Tender, R.E.M. — deploying songs not for nostalgia's sake but for the specific emotional frequencies they carry. When Under Pressure plays, the film allows the pop pleasure and the dread to occupy the same moment, neither cancelling the other. It is, like the best of Aftersun, a refusal to be simple about what the past feels like.

Wells's instinct for what to leave out is as striking as what she includes. Aftersun commits wholly to Sophie's partial, child's-eye perspective. We never get inside Calum's head directly; we only infer. That withholding is not a trick. It is the film's subject. Adult Sophie has only what she filmed, what she remembers, and the gap between them — the gap in which, she now suspects, her father was suffering in ways she was too young to see or he was too loving to show. Wells refuses to diagnose or explain. The result is not vagueness but something more demanding: the invitation to sit with ambiguity, to grieve without certainty, to love a person you are still in the process of understanding.

That Aftersun emerged as a debut feature — produced on a modest budget, with A24 distributing in the US and MUBI handling the UK release — and achieved the critical response it did says something both about the exceptional nature of the work and about the appetite that exists for films that operate at this register. It is quiet, slow, formally rigorous, and emotionally annihilating. Those are not contradictory qualities; in Wells's hands, they are the same quality, expressed through different means.

It is the kind of film that British cinema produces when it is working at its best: small in scale, enormous in reach.