Movie Review: 'Aftersun' is One of the Best of 2022

Aftersun (2022)

Directed by Charlotte Wells

Written by Charlotte Wells

Starring Paul Mescal, Frankie Corio, Celia Rowlson-Hall

Release Date October 21st, 2022

Published December 14th, 2022

Aftersun is a quiet and thoughtful meditation on the struggles of growing up as both a child and a young parent. Paul Mescal stars in the film as Calum Paterson, the father of Sophie (Frankie Corio), a precocious young woman. Together, father and daughter are taking a holiday in Turkey, some time in the late 90s. It's unclear why Dad chose this location or whether he could even afford such a vacation, his work back home in England seems unstable, at best, based on a few snatches of dialogue throughout the film.

First time director Charlotte Wells takes a fly on the wall approach to Aftersun which gives the storytelling a strongly authentic feel. Father and daughter talk but the drama of the story is in what is not said. It comes from the moments when Calum, clearly struggling with his mental health, likely depression, does everything he can not to let on to his daughter that something is wrong. He already feels guilty for not being around more, he and Sophie's mother have split up, and he's struggling with being young and not knowing how to be a father.

The film story evolves through a series of set pieces, seemingly mundane moments of father-daughter bonding. Swimming, sun tanning, dinners, video games, even a little pool hustling, dad and daughter have an unconventional relationship. Calum is a loving father, he takes his fatherly authority seriously but he's also young, inexperienced, and rather clueless about how to be a dad to a growing young woman. He's filled with love but also fear, confusion, and mild ambivalence. He's fighting internally over whether Sophie could be happier without him.

What happens with Calum is a bit of a mystery. We know that this vacation occurred in the pre-internet past. No cell phones or email. We know, from flash forwards to an older Sophie, played by Celia Rowlson-Hall, that Calum was, at the very least, absent from his daughter's life some time after this vacation. And we know from a series of brief dream sequences that there is antipathy between father and daughter though what that antipathy extends from, we don't know, we assume it comes from his absence.

Charlotte Wells is deliberately vague about Calum's motivations and what his intentions are after having spent this week on vacation with his daughter. The temptation is to assume that he may have committed suicide but there is no direct indication that this is what occurred. Aftersun subtly and brilliantly leaves bread crumbs that could lead in that direction but the movie isn't about setting you up for a big gut punch, this is an observant human drama where you will have to discern for yourself what the outcome may be.

Aftersun is a gorgeous film, the locations are lovely but also fitting of a man who can't afford luxury but appears to be spending all that he has for what luxury he can get. The father-daughter dynamic is lovely with Frankie Corio delivering a charming performance, never too precocious, never beyond her years. She's observant, and she does act as an audience avatar, trying hard to understand her loving yet inscrutable father, but she's mostly just a kid who loves her dad.

When you're a child you don't realize the lengths parents go to to create a world for you. Parents are forced to try and hide their emotions for the sake of the well-being of their kids. They spend money they don't have to give their kids the impression that the world they created for them is still in place. They ball up their pain deep inside so as not to allow children to know something is wrong. It's the nature of being a parent and in Paul Mescal's brilliant performance and Charlotte Wells' exceptional direction we get a poignant reminder of the basic humanity behind the veil of being a good parent.

The anxiety of wanting to give your child more than just love, more than just security, and being unable to deliver, is ungodly. I don't have children and I cannot claim to fully understand it but, having been the son of a single mother who raised two kids on welfare and multiple retail jobs, I can only today understand the strength it must have taken for mother to get through everyday and not show the agony she was in, the harrowing angst of struggling to keep kids fed, warm, and loved.

It's never stated that Calum is struggling, nothing much is made plain in dialogue. And yet, the signs are there in Mescal's performances and in the choices made by Charlotte Wells in what she chooses to show of him. It's so skillfully, thoughtfully presented. It's in brief glimpses, in a sunken glance, a moment of emotional distance. The biggest hint toward Calum's mindset comes when he seems to disappear for a night, following an argument with his daughter. We are with Sophie as she's been locked out of their hotel room and her father isn't responding to her knocking on the door. We don't know where he is and she ends up sleeping in the lobby on a couch.

The sequence is heart wrenching to watch even as Sophie is mostly calm and unfazed. She's annoyed that she can't get into the room and to the bed but she's not worried. We however, are terrified, uncertain and unnerved. Wells keeps us with Sophie in this sequence and that smart choice creates tension in ways that a larger and more dramatic display could never. It's pure filmmaking and I cannot praise enough how Charlotte Wells uses smart choices of where to keep the audience to tell this story without relying on dialogue.

Aftersun is one of the best movies of 2022.

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