“Aftersun”: A Fragmented Reconciliation with Memories and Ghosts

How do we come to terms with the mysteries of childhood recollection?

WARNING: This review contains spoilers.

Aftersun, lauded as a debut masterpiece from Charlotte Wells, is a slowly plotted film that rejects the structural tenets of a narrative to reveal a chronologically complex reminiscence on childhood memories. The film follows a vacation to Turkey shared between a daughter, Sophie (Frankie Corio) and a father, Calum (Paul Mescal), relived by Sophie as an adult through the extensive camcorder footage she documented as an eleven year old. Aftersun’s seemingly meaningless meandering slowly contorts into an understated examination of how small moments of memories transform into prolonged emotional blows.

Initially, Aftersun seems aggressively straightforward: a simple and endearing story of a Scottish father and daughter who are spending their summer holiday at a resort in Turkey. Sophie, who lives with her mother after her parents’ divorce, barely sees her father, so she decides to document the trip on a miniDV camera. But as their holiday elapses and Sophie begins to reconcile with her budding adolescence, she is exposed to a new side of her father — a dark, tangled, and broken person who desperately tries to mask his regret and pain to see his daughter happy. Sophie begins to catch real glimpses of adulthood all while trying to preserve lasting remnants of her childhood image of the world. 

Towards the third act of the story, Charlotte Wells begins to show us snippets of Sophie’s adult life, revealing that the previous story was retrospective, simply relived through grainy digital footage. She is a parent now, and has a partner, and is seemingly trying to reconcile with the ghosts that linger in her memories, trying to pinpoint her father’s pain with her now adult clarity of the situation. 

Aftersun is elusive and never clarifies its chronology or explains its exact moment of grief. Sophie’s memories are fragmented, and no matter how many times she rewinds the tape, there are holes that will never be filled. Sometimes, Wells gives us a moment of a character observed from afar — Sophie and Calum alone when they think no one else can see them. Though we are hardly given the emotional context to properly digest their pain, it often feels uncomfortably intimate, like we are seeing more than we should, more than each character would ever choose to share with us. With these small moments of vulnerability, we follow suit with Sophie’s initiative, desperately trying to fill gaps and fit puzzle pieces together to truly understand and reconcile with each character. But, like Sophie’s childhood memory reevaluated in adulthood, the newfound clarity and barrier of time will never let us truly understand them after they are lost — after Calum says goodbye to Sophie at the airport, shuts off the video camera, and returns alone down the bleak hallway. 

OVERALL SCORE: 9/10

Aftersun was released on October 28 and is currently in US theaters and streaming on demand.