Aftersun (2022)
Sophie (Frankie Corio) holds fast to her father Calum (Paul Mescal) in Aftersun
This movie does what only movies can do. Through tight but never leering closeups, astonishingly subtle acting that feels more like actual behavior, and unhurried, watchful directing, it takes us inside the hearts and minds of two unremarkable people.
But Aftersun reveals what quivers beneath the everyday. What we’re rarely able to detect, but what churns and severs and aches, unseen.
Calum (Paul Mescal) is a regular fellow, Scottish, early thirties, on holiday in an “economical” resort hotel in Turkey with precocious pre-pubescent Sophie (Frankie Corio), his 11-year-old daughter.
We wonder why father and daughter are vacationing alone. Calum expresses the hope that Sophie and her mother are getting along better. Sophie reports that they are. Since he has to ask, we realize that Calum and Sophie's mother are divorced.
So, this trip is a renewal. Yet father and daughter seem breezily familiar with one another, like teasing pals. At the same time, Calum is a shade tentative, a slightly reticent caregiver who’s a bit out of practice with this “parent” thing.
He quietly corrects another hotel guest who says the pair look like brother and sister. Startlingly, we know at once that we’d never have made that mistake. They cling to each other not with the competitive to-and-fro of siblings, but with the longing of parent and child, both a little scared as they grow closer and further apart.
People need one another. Everyone stands alone. Those are Aftersun’s conflicting, beautifully unforced, truths.
The Scottish writer-director Charlotte Wells, in her first movie, turns us into careful observers. We have to be. How can we not notice that for nearly their entire stay at the resort, Calum and Sophie cavort in bathing suits? They slather suntan lotion on one another with an “abandon” that nonetheless feels circumspect, slightly uneasy.
As we watch, the lines between close, caring and erotic never blur, but they do glow, and we feel disquiet in this pair’s ceaseless physicality.
They sleep in separate beds, but when Calum runs his hand gently across his daughter’s forehead, and, with Sophie’s eyes closed, bends down to kiss her exactly there – and nowhere else – we hold our breath. Is a line about to be crossed?
No, it isn’t. The shiver of doubt is ours. Do they wonder? We’re not sure. But we’re intrigued by Wells’ intentions. What is all this edgy close-but-not-too-close maneuvering telling us?
For one thing, that they’re trying to live up to one another’s expectations, which removes a lot of their curiosity about other guests. The two stick together. True, they join in games of billiards and water polo, and the intensely shy Sophie forms a light bond with a chubby boy her own age.
She and the boy later kiss (Sophie’s first?), and she quickly confesses the deed to her dad. As long as she and the boy are the same age, Calum responds, it’s no big deal. “You can tell me anything”, he assures her, words every parent recites to every child.
But the movie is slowly unveiling what neither of them can articulate. Something starker, more conclusive, is happening on this vacation. Sophie cruelly points out to her father that she hasn’t asked to venture outside the resort’s amenities because he couldn’t afford it.
He numbly, silently nods, knowing that his daughter has stated a glaring fact. And she’s done it with a mean little smile, used it against him, which is, we gather, a new stratagem. Parents can be abused.
But Calum isn’t always faithful to Sophie. Sophie begs him to join her at the microphone in a karaoke contest. Self-conscious, he flatly refuses. After weakly singing alone onstage, Sophie angrily vows to stay on at the event, and he stalks off alone.
Wells has been leading us to this rupture. Sophie is becoming her own person. She can stand apart from her father, and he can’t “order” her not to. Placing demands on her isn’t “parenting”, it’s control, and Sophie is learning the difference.
Calum, in two quietly shattering scenes, begins to lose his grip on this precious “parenthood” he’s trying to master. With Sophie sliding out from under his shadow, he’s left to confront what he hasn’t been, and likely won’t ever be, for his daughter: a strong, protective figure.
The caring father crumbles, and the broken, terrified man all but runs for his life.
Then, well into the story, we get brief glimpses of the adult Sophie (Celia Rowlson-Hall), which finally make clear that we’re watching a memory piece, a happy/melancholy recollection.
Sophie (Frankie Corio) clings to her loving father Calum (Paul Mescal) in Aftersun
The movie recalls a pivotal week when father and daughter, not without pain, came into their own as separate, loving individuals.
The adult Sophie is realizing that this was when she and her father first stepped onto separate, diverging paths. Did they remain close afterwards? We’re not told.
But from this transformative vacation onward, we understand that they’ll move forward in loving relation to, but no longer dependent on, one another.
People need one another. Everyone stands alone. Those are Aftersun’s conflicting, beautifully unforced, truths.
Mescal, in his staggering performance in BBC Three TV’s series Normal People (2020), skillfully let flow a wide range of emotions. That series covered a number of years in the lives of two young people.
Here, in a story that takes place in a little over a week, he gives a more mature account of vulnerability, in an older character who is still taking trembling steps into adulthood.
Mescal shows Calum groping toward appreciating his young daughter, while his own growth, his own future, is actually more troubled than hers. He can offer her constant love but can promise nothing in the way of stability.
You’re always becoming a better parent, the script suggests. While your unresolved self tags along, begging mercy from, most of all, your child.
Corio stays unflaggingly within the right age range as Sophie, a girl who loves, even admires her dad but is reluctantly learning to judge him, sometimes pitilessly. With uncommon ease, Corio shows Sophie making this cold leap forward without ever sounding like a “wise” child.
When she gives in and lets herself be dragged onto the dance floor to let loose with Calum, she reminds him she “doesn't dance”. But it makes her old man happy. She can do that for him, which is a gesture, a self-sacrifice, she hadn’t known she could offer.
These two performances, and the unobtrusive, tactful work of cinematographer Gregory Oke and editor Blair McClendon, keep Wells’ subtle but candid vision gripping us, minute by cryptic minute.
The slow pace is actually tuning us up, readying us for the life-changing revelations that surprise two people who are simply on vacation, hoping to grow closer and actually gaining more respect for one another by standing apart.
It’s a bountiful, if wrenching, reversal. With the overlapping, lacelike revelations and fine, needlepoint acting, you’ll know you haven’t been watching television.