by Matt Dinn

A painful tinge of melancholy lingers throughout Charlotte Wells’ stunning debut, Aftersun. Wells’ debut feature is told through fractured moments that don’t entirely reveal themselves as the film pieces itself together. The film is a rare case of the total being more than the sum of its parts, wherein its lingering effect produces a power that envelops the viewer more upon reflection of the film than during the process of watching it.

Eleven-year-old Sophie (Frankie Corio) is on vacation with her father, Calum (Paul Mescal). As the film progresses, the emotions feel significant, but their specific reasons seem more uncertain. That’s because, as we learn, these are moments as they were remembered and not as they are happening. Mescal’s Calum begins to seem more distant, isolated, and desolate. Frankie is eleven. How could she know anything is wrong when Calum doesn’t seem entirely sure himself? But as the film progresses, the audience’s omniscience clues that something is wrong with Calum. But his pain is abstract. He has moments of vivaciousness, juxtaposed with stillness, silence, and eventually, sadness that suggest an inability to regulate or even understand his emotions. The power of the film lies within the struggling reconciliation between the beautiful things human connectivity offers with the inability to ever truly know another person and possibly even to know one’s self.

The film is also a bracing commentary of how, as much as time can inform us, it can’t fully heal us. All the reflection and lived experiences that have informed Sophie’s memory of her father can’t go back to that Turkish vacation and get her eleven-year-old self to ask why he was hurting. It can only complicate her father and make her seem more human than most children’s idealized portrait of their parents or guardians. As a child, everything exists in black and white, and Calum is colored entirely in grey. Sophie’s spent her entire life searching for what got him there, hoping that one day a door will swing open and they can see into each other for the first time. [A-]