Spoilers Included
“There’s This Feeling, Once You Leave Where You Grew Up, That You Don’t Totally Belong There Again.”
Calum
The film Aftersun (2022), directed by Charlotte Wells, follows the story of Sophie (Frankie Corio) and Calum (Paul Mescal). The film synopsis reads:
“Sophie reflects on the shared joy and private melancholy of a holiday she took with her father twenty years earlier. Memories real and imagined fill the gaps between miniDV footage as she tries to reconcile the father she knew with the man she didn’t.”
It’s compellingly beautiful. It shines in how it chooses to place quiet moments of struggle at the forefront. You wait for a climax or something relatively big to happen, but nothing does. I feel as though this story structure reflects the film’s tone. The golden hues of a sunny vacation with Sophie and Calum contrasted with the cooler tones of the isolated scenes of Calum. There are moments when we are left alone with Calum, in times of contemplation, hurt, and sadness. As we watch, a private moment plays out, and it feels wrong to be present. It feels as though it exposes a sense of sadness we hope that nobody will ever witness with us.
Another part of the film I wanted to point out was Sophie’s nightmares. There’s a strobe light that gives us little pieces of the scene that is being played out but we never fully grasp its purpose for existing until the older version of Sophie hugs her father in the end. She is now the same age as Calum when he inevitably passed away, most likely not too long after that trip. But her memories past that trip, like the strobe light scenes, are bits and pieces fragmented.
Sophie’s reflection on that summer vacation with her father seems to be a potent memory, and when she rewatches the videos, she’s trying to capture a small hole in her memories. She’s trying to see if when she rewatches the videos with new eyes, she’ll understand her father. Quiet moments of hurt made me emotional. When Calum breaks down in tears, you feel disturbed not because it is simply someone crying, but because you’re witnessing a private moment that you were not invited into. At times, it feels hard to watch, thinking about how it would feel for someone to take a video of you in secret when all you want is a moment of release, to be so unabashed in how you choose to express all of the times when you’ve kept quiet about your own sadness.
Aftersun finds its beauty in disheartening moments of isolation and a twenty-year-old memory of a daughter revisiting one of her last memories with her father. The film, I feel, does a beautiful job of capturing a sense of sadness and nostalgia. It’s clear that Calum loves his daughter so much, but even more obvious are his struggles with his own sadness. I enjoyed that this film doesn’t necessarily have a climax. Sometimes, depression or even your own sadness does not have a climax. It’s isolating to know that there are people that you love and who love you, yet you have this aching weight of sadness that will not let go of you. It hurts. That aching is an ongoing struggle where you feel as though you’re not enough for the people you love.
With this film, you feel saddened on both sides. When you watch Calum quietly struggle, it’s saddening to be familiar with that isolation. From Sophie’s perspective, you feel stuck. It’s a sense of inability to make a change or to help someone you know that was more than enough in your life.
This film is also beautiful in its soft and creamy colors along with the grainy texture added. I watched this film on a projector, and I wish I had watched it on a screen because the projector drowned out the colors, but I still found beauty in its camera composition.
Aftersun is a film I highly recommend watching.