It’s my spring break, and while I didn’t take the whole week off, I did opt for a long weekend, and it turned out a movie I was vaguely aware of was leaving Netflix on the first day of my extended weekend: the semi-autobiographical feature film debut for writer/director Charlotte Wells, Aftersun. It wasn’t quite on my radar, but the article I briefly spotted on the subject called it one of the best films to come out of the last few years, so why not? I have the time to see it.
Besides, it might be nice to see lead actor Paul Mescal in something where he isn’t trying to do a so-so impression of one of Russell Crowe’s best-known roles.
Eleven-year old Sophie Patterson (Frankie Corio) is going on a father-daughter vacation to a Turkish resort with her dad Calum (Mescal). Calum and Sophie’s mother had an amicable break-up at some point, and this vacation is coinciding with Calum’s upcoming 31st birthday, an age Calum tells a diving instructor at one point that he never expected to make. Sophie is starting to grow up a bit and discover boys, and her dad is doing things like sneak cigarettes, do tai chi, and read self-help books. Sophie is a bit sensitive to her dad’s moods, even when he’s doing his best to hide them, and while the pair do have a falling out when he declines to do karaoke with her, it’s a brief thing.
However, there’s something going on, and Sophie as an adult (Celia Rowlson-Hall) is trying to figure it out her dad, seen symbolically through a series of interspersed scenes involving adult Sophie’s walking through a rave with a lot of strobe lighting as she makes her way to her dad, still the same age as when he was on vacation with her all those years before. What happened to her dad? Why is he the way he is? Sophie is still trying to figure that out.
And the audience may be thinking about it too because the whole point is that Sophie, telling the story as an adult (more or less), doesn’t really know. There are a few scenes of Calum alone, and he seems lost and miserable. There’s an implied action that happens after the vacation, but since Sophie doesn’t know why Calum did whatever it is he did, the audience doesn’t either. That’s a credit to Wells as her film here doesn’t explain what happened so much as imply things, mirroring the very lack of knowledge that Sophie has either as a child or as an adult. She has some ideas about her dad. She just doesn’t know why he is the way he is.
It helps that Mescal and Corio are both so good in their respective roles. Corio’s Sophie is a sweet girl on the edge of adolescence, and she knows her dad is maybe not as put-together as he is pretending to be. Mescal is fantastic, though, as a loving dad who does a lot good dad things, but when he’s alone, sheds some of his outer layers to show a man who’s hurting and hurting bad. The final shot, of Calum walking away as Sophie flies home to London without him, is a sad, lonely man on his way to, well, what the movie implied he did sometime after the vacation. It’s a touching movie, a sad story, and the sort of thing that stays with you as the viewer, likes Sophie, just wants to know what was wrong with Calum, perhaps in the hopes of helping him or at least just understanding him.
Grade: A
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