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The emotionally potent aftermath of Aftersun
Tuesday, February 4, 2025
Produced by A24, Aftersun follows an 11-year-old girl named Sophie (Corio) and her father Calum (Paul Mescal) on summer trip to Turkey, blending present-day reflections and home video clips to reveal their tender but complex bond. The film's quiet storytelling, powerful acting, and evocative visuals explore themes of memory, mental health, and parent-child relationships, making it a critically acclaimed work celebrated for its emotional resonance and artistic direction.
To listen to a recording of our CineVerse group discussion of this film, conducted last week, click here.
In a movie with a threadbare plot, you’d likely expect words to capture our attention. Yet there’s very little dialogue in Aftersun. We trust that Sophie and Calum have a strong daughter-father bond, but much goes unspoken. This makes us completely reliant on the performances and chemistry between these two actors.
Watching Aftersun, you can’t help but notice several key shots that show Calum and/or Sophie as echoed images, such as reflected off a mirror, body of water, or TV screen. These facsimile visuals, offbeat compositions, and unexpected visual choices correlate with and underpin a key message of the movie: reconstructed and altered memories.
We are given Sophie’s POV fairly consistently, but there are some shots and sequences not from her perspective, where she is not present. Quite possibly these moments minus Sophie also represent her retroactive point of view, as if she has reconstructed things that were a mystery to her as a child and envisioned, for example, what her father did when they were apart (trying to light the cigarette on the balcony, diving into the pitch black ocean).
Perhaps Aftersun’s greatest attribute is its power to help us see the world through the eyes of a child. Although she is precociously perceptive, Sophie is still only 11 and cannot quite grasp what’s behind her father’s inherent sadness, hesitancy, and dysfunction. We, like her, can only try to piece together the puzzle that is Calum based on visual fragments and auditory clues filtered through the lens of her young experiences as well as the literal lens of Calum’s camcorder footage Sophie views later as an adult.
Using reconstructed and altered memories, this movie examines how childhood recollections and past visions can be reinterpreted as an adult, taking on new meanings and significance. Guardian critic Peter Bradshaw subscribes to this theory: “Aftersun is about childhood memories being worn to a sheen by being constantly replayed in your mind, about the meanings that were not there then, but are there now, revealed or perhaps created by the remembering mind, and endowed with a new poignancy and grace.” New Republic reviewer Daphne Merkin is of a like mind, writing: “It portrays an endlessly refracted reality, filtered through the haze of memory, in which we look at Calum in a mirror looking at a video camera; he meanwhile connects with his daughter mainly through filtered or mediated images, such as the surface of the resort’s pool. It is as though reality were composed of platonic shadows of things rather than the things or people in themselves.”
Aftersun stands as one of the most effective and devastating modern works about processing grief and loss. (Spoiler) It’s strongly suggested that Sophie’s father died sometime after he shot the footage of their Turkish vacation, recorded in the late 1990s (as evidenced by the TV and camcorder technology present in the story, the 1990s pop music heard, the fact that no cellular phones are used, and what her father tells the young man working on the boat: “I can’t see myself at 40, to be honest. I’m surprised I made it to 30.”). One hint that her holiday with dad at 11 years old was their last time spent together is the dance scene toward the conclusion, punctuated by the lyrics to the Queen’s Under Pressure: “This is our last dance.” Consider, as well, how Sophie continues to have hallucination-like dreams or fantasies about her father dancing under strobe lights in a dark club; the last version of this imagery shows young Sophie morphing into her adult self and trying to embrace her father.
Recall, as well, how the last time we see Calum is presumably at the airport when he is videotaping Sophie saying goodbye, but this father figure turns around, walks down the corridor, and opens a door that reveals a strobe-lit dark club-like atmosphere, insinuating surreality and a link to Sophie’s dream imagery. “Wells intersperses the vacation with surreal dream-like ‘rave’ sequences…She wants to get to him, touch him, hold him,” Roger Ebert.com reviewer Sheila O’Malley wrote. “Sophie is an adult now. She understands him so much better now. What would it be like if she could talk to him? They would still have so much to say to one another. In a way, Aftersun is an act of imaginative empathy. Sophie can now look at the things that child Sophie could not see.”
This is, of course, a coming-of-age picture about the transition from childhood to adulthood, although Sophie isn’t ready to make that leap yet. In Turkey, she remains relatively naïve, innocent, and inexperienced about worldly matters, as you’d expect given her age. But she’s starting to figure things out around the periphery, including paying attention to sexual and relationship cues, adult emotional states, and dangers to female safety. Heads up to all you parents of tweenagers: Sophie is no unicorn; your kids are more keenly insightful than you think.
Similar works
- Paper Moon (1973)
- The Piano (1993)
- Fly Away Home (1996)
- Whale Rider (2002)
- The Ballad of Jack and Rose (2005)
- The Pursuit of Happyness (2006)
- Little Miss Sunshine (2006)
- Fish Tank (2009)
- An Education (2009)
- Eighth Grade (2013)
Other short films by Charlotte Wells
- Tuesday
- Laps
- Blue Christmas
