There aren’t many debuts with the mysterious emotional outburst of Aftersun – a deceptively loose, utterly seductive father-daughter drama from Scottish writer-director Charlotte Wells.
With an eerily accurate evocation of vacationing in the Turkish Riviera at the turn of the millennium, Wells based this stunner on childhood memories of traveling with her own father. She had just entered puberty, at that somewhat awkward stage when she was too old to play with kids alone, but too young to hang out with the horny teens at the resort.
As Sophie, this remembered version of herself, she’s cast a newcomer, Frankie Corio, who has a magically curious quality and is so believable it hurts. She often grabs a camcorder and trains it on her young dad (Paul Mescal), who’s single after a divorce we learn little about, and tries to spend quality time with his daughter before going down the road of all teens.
One of the little things Aftersun does wonderfully is capture that familiar holiday feeling of good days and bad days, or moods that shift for no particular reason, other than maybe being in each other’s company a little too long. Sophie’s father even has moods within moods, or a general sense of unhappiness that he protects her from: when she tries to ask him rather mature questions about his state of mind, he ducks. For her sake, he puts on a front, and it is only in his moments of loneliness that the demons sneak out. We already know from Normal People the subtlety Mescal, one of the most gifted actors of his generation, is capable of, but his indications of pain are sublimely underexposed here.
Wells graduated from this feature film after three impressive short films, including the brilliant Laps (2017), about a woman who is sexually assaulted in a crowded subway. She has given Aftersun an intriguing form with the camcorder footage, but also with short jumps forward in time, where we see Sophie’s adult self without getting to know her at all. As played by the dancer Celia Rowlson-Hall, she’s about the same age as her father these days, on what we’re slowly suspecting could be their last vacation. There are strobe shots of her, as well as small glimpses of Mescal, in a nightclub, a location that does metaphorical work for the film’s view of memory.