Aftersun review – luminous father-daughter drama starring Paul Mescal

Earlier this month, the debut feature from Scottish-born, New York-based writer-director Charlotte Wells picked up a whopping 16 nominations for the British Independent Film awards, an impressive haul second only to Saint Maud’s record-breaking performance in 2020. It’s easy to see why Aftersun has generated such excitement since premiering at Cannes in May. A brilliantly assured and stylistically adventurous work, this beautifully understated yet emotionally riveting coming-of-age drama picks apart themes of love and loss in a manner so dextrous as to seem almost accidental. Don’t be fooled; Wells knows exactly what she’s doing, and her storytelling is as precise as it is piercing.

We meet young, separated father Calum (Normal People’s Paul Mescal) and his 11-year-old daughter, Sophie (screen newcomer Frankie Corio), on holiday together in Turkey in the late 1990s. Sophie is smart for her age (she and Calum are sometimes mistaken for siblings) but she’s still also very much a child, torn between hanging out with the younger kids at the resort or with the more boisterous teenagers who lounge around the pool table. As for Calum, his outward calm seems to cover demons of denial; a trancey energy that threatens to break through the placid surface of his current life, dragging him back into a more chaotic – or euphoric – existence (Moonlight director and Aftersun co-producer Barry Jenkins describes Calum as “wading through wells of quiet anguish”).

Scrappy DV-cam footage offers apparently concrete evidence of the interactions between Sophie and Calum, with both roles being performed with quite breathtaking naturalism. Yet Aftersun is constructed as a very personal recollection, filtered through a haze of memory and imagination by the now-adult Sophie (Celia Rowlson-Hall) looking back on things she didn’t really understand at the time. That tension between fact and fiction – between recorded and remembered events – draws us deep into the drama, causing us to examine every frame as if searching for clues to a hidden truth that remains tantalisingly elusive. It often seems as if the real story is playing out beyond the edges of the frame, dancing in the shadows beyond the confines of the screen. Plaudits to editor Blair McClendon, who juxtaposes scenes and images in almost hyperreal, dreamlike fashion, conjuring a magical space in which time seems to bend emotionally.

Appropriately for a work that is clearly profoundly personal, Wells says the roots of Aftersun lay in flipping through holiday albums of herself as a child and being struck by how young her father looked. Later, she came across a photo in which she was sitting by a pool in Spain, with “a very beautiful woman right behind me… and it made me wonder who the real subject of the picture was”. That sense of mystery runs throughout this mesmerising feature, which, despite being set largely in the past, nonetheless feels peculiarly present.

Some of the groundwork for Aftersun was laid in Wells’s 2015 short film Tuesday (she has called this “a sequel of sorts, in a different place and time”). There’s more than a hint of the tactility of Lynne Ramsay’s early works, with short films such as Gasman (1997) and features such as Ratcatcher (1999) clearly serving as inspirations. Just as Ramsay has an almost uncanny ability to capture the texture of memories on screen, so Wells showcases a Proustian talent for transporting the audience back into a world they didn’t actually experience, while making them feel like they did. There are also clear traces of the films of Margaret Tait in Wells’s craft, specifically Blue Black Permanent (1992), which seems to have served as a tonal reference (a volume of Tait’s writings is prominently displayed on screen).

Gregory Oke’s cinematography captures the colour of memory, with bright exteriors and glowing surfaces carefully graded by Kath Raisch to evoke vivid snapshots of fleeting moments. Composer Oliver Coates weaves his way in and out of the film’s emotional labyrinth, while deftly chosen needle drops (including a mashed-up vocal version of the Queen-David Bowie hit Under Pressure) put us right there in the moment.