Aftersun

Charlotte Wells made Aftersun in 2022, her first feature, and it looks deceptively small. A young Scottish father and his eleven-year-old daughter take a package holiday at a Turkish seaside resort sometime in the late nineties: pool loungers, buffet dinners, karaoke night, a camcorder. Paul Mescal plays Calum, barely into his thirties, working hard at being good company while something in him keeps slipping out of view. Frankie Corio, in her first role, plays Sophie, watchful and funny, old enough to register her father's silences without knowing what they mean. Much of the film lives in the gap between what a child sees and what an adult later understands. Wells frames the holiday as memory. An older Sophie, played by Celia Rowlson-Hall, combs through grainy camcorder footage of the trip, searching the frames for the man her father actually was. The drama stays quiet on the surface, hidden tensions rather than confrontations, and Wells lets scenes run past their natural endpoint, giving Calum's private sadness time to build. It is slow, deliberately so, and the slowness is the point, though the recurring strobe-lit dance floor image gets asked to carry more weight than any single image should. What stays with you is smaller anyway: Sophie alone on the karaoke stage, gamely singing, and Calum unable to make himself join her.

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