The Thing About Remembering

Aftersun reaches its peak when Sophie points a camcorder at her motionless father who sits in the Turkish hotel lighting. Calum doesn't want to be filmed. Keeps turning away. The camera insists.

Actually, that's the whole film.

Charlotte Wells handles memory as if it were shattered glass which reveals its jagged parts while showing light through its empty spaces. The blues elements in this piece exceed their typical musical parameters of blues music. The color is a distinct blue mixture of chlorine from pools and cheap hotel TV screens which instantly transports you back to your age of eleven. Through his lens Gregory Oke discovers hidden spaces of color which appear to be mental fragments extracted from a human mind. Turquoise shadows. Orange sunset bleeding through curtains. The strobe lights in this film appear unexpectedly because they do not belong to the movie yet continue to disrupt the story like traumatic memories.

Paul Mescal plays Calum as if exhaustion lives in his bones. Not tired. Exhausted. Different thing entirely. His body posture folds inward whenever Sophie is not present. He suddenly returned to his dad persona by performing silly dance moves and sharing his awful jokes. His physical efforts to succeed cause me actual pain. During the karaoke segment he performs "Losing My Religion" yet his disturbing situation remains visible to the audience.

Wait, I'm getting ahead of myself.

Sophie chooses to wear vibrant vacation clothes from resort shops which seem to have been picked out by her father. Yellows and pinks that clash with everything. Lucy Norris dressed the child in a manner that resembled the unsuccessful attempts of divorced fathers to be fun parents through their use of overly bright colors and slightly offbeat choices and excessive enthusiasm. But then Calum's in these faded shirts, washed-out colors. Like he's already disappearing.

The film repeats the same moment multiple times throughout the movie. Different angles. Or maybe the same angle but something's off. Memory functions with an imperfect level of accuracy. Sophie says at one point, "I think it's nice that we share the same sky," and later you realize adult Sophie is trying to share anything with a ghost.

Frankie Corio doesn't act like a child actor. She behaves as if she were a child. Massive difference. She watches Mescal with a combination of love and worry which mirrors how children see adult matters that are too complex for them to understand. The chemistry between them works because they both remain oblivious to their situation in a film.

Look, here's what actually bothers me. The film refuses to tell you what happens to Calum. The character continues to suggest things without directly stating them. The strobe-light rave sequence keeps interrupting like Sophie's adult mind trying to remember her father's disappearance. Wells could have given us answers. Suicide? Breakdown? Just gone? Instead we get these gorgeous, frustrating glimpses of something awful approaching.

The scene shows Calum being unable to purchase the carpet which Sophie has chosen. Small moment. He acts as if he does not enjoy it at all. Mescal shows a brief change in his expression before his face returns to its normal state. That's the whole movie right there. The numerous minor problems create a massive weight that becomes too much to handle.

Actually no, the pool scenes are the whole movie. All that blue. Every person's skin appears like it is under water even when they are not wet. Calum demonstrates tai chi to Sophie in a comical manner while they both laugh together. The camera distance in Wells' work stays at a slight distance which creates the effect of viewing through time.

The conclusion does not bring an end to the story. Just stops. Adult Sophie watching young Sophie watching Calum walk away through airport security. The rave event started again as Calum vanished into the flashing lights and dancing crowd. Sophie dancing alone in her room to "Under Pressure," which, honestly, too on-the-nose but it works anyway because everything here commits so hard to emotional honesty that subtlety becomes irrelevant.