Aftersun
At a fading vacation resort, 11-year-old Sophie treasures rare time together with her loving and idealistic father, Calum. As a world of adolescence creeps into view, beyond her eye Calum struggles under the weight of life outside of fatherhood. Twenty years later, Sophie's tender recollections of their last holiday become a powerful and heartrending portrait of their relationship, as she tries to reconcile the father she knew with the man she didn't.
- Released: 2022-10-21
- Runtime: 101 minutes
- Genre: Drama
- Stars: Frankie Corio, Paul Mescal, Celia Rowlson-Hall, Sally Messham, Ayse Parlak, Sophia Lamanova, Brooklyn Toulson, Spike Fearn, Harry Perdios, Frank Corio, Ruby Thompson, Ethan James Smith, Onur Ekşioğlu, Cafer Karahan, Kayleigh Coleman, John Stuifzand, Tyler Mutlu, Kieran Burton, Nijat Gachayev, Sarah Makharine, Erol Cengizalp
- Director: Charlotte Wells
Comments
- brentsbulletinboard - 13 January 2023
Too Many Gaps To Fill In
It's one thing for a movie to be subtle and nuanced, but it's something else entirely to be enigmatic and cryptic. And, regrettably, the debut feature from writer-director Charlotte Wells delivers more of the latter than the former. This melancholic character study tells the story of a woman (Celia Rowlson-Hall) who looks back 20 years to a vacation that her perky 11-year-old self (Frankie Corio) took with her young and loving but quietly troubled father (Paul Mescal). In doing so, it explores the subjects of memory, parent-child relationships, mental and emotional well-being, and the various senses of loss we all experience over time, topics that the protagonist's youthful counterpart may not have fully understood at the time but that her adult self now does. I wish I could say the same for myself, though; I often felt that I was being tasked to construct a narrative for the picture myself, based, essentially, on merely what was being shown to me, material that frequently comes across as underdeveloped and open to an array of interpretation in terms of both story line and character development. To put it simply, I didn't feel I was given enough substance to work with to accomplish that task, and it often left me feeling wanting, abandoned by the filmmaker, and, ultimately, uninterested. And, to complicate matters further, the film's poor sound quality regularly obscures the characters' dialogue behind their thick Scottish accents, and its often-dark, overly muddled cinematography made some images difficult to decipher at times. What's more, this offering's camera work - aimed at simulating glorified home movies, a fitting approach for telling this story - is packed with innocuous material. Indeed, who really cares about sitting through endless footage of the characters engaging in mundane activities like playing video games, eating ice cream and attempting to sing karaoke? The "looking back in fondness" factor in these supposedly touching segments is a little too inane to engender truly heart-tugging feelings, constituting cinematic padding more than anything integral or meaningful to the overall story. Considering all of the advance glowing reactions I had read about this release, I was really looking forward to it going in. Unfortunately, though, I came away from it almost as sad and disappointed as the protagonist herself. - ben-snooks - 8 January 2023
Conflicted about this film
It's a well made film with great acting by both main leads but I was kind of left feeling empty at the end. The story slowly built for two hours then we see the father at a nightclub never to be seen again. Did he die? Did he leave on purpose? Did Sophie actually push him away. We don't know and the writer/director doesn't really show us. The holiday seemed a bit surreal because it was almost too perfect, like all the best moments of summer holidays rolled into one. My upbringing was never so rosy. Why is Sophie now so many years later going through the memories of this holiday? The focus of the film is on the holiday and then also on the reality that a relationship can end. I think we all know this as friends and family come into and often leave our lives over time. I'm not really sure what the film is trying to say. Enjoy the moments while they last? It's not clear. I'd like to rate this film more highly but the ending or lack of one was frustrating more than anything.
