For most of the past year, I have heard one refrain among cinephiles: You HAVE to see Aftersun (2022). It’s one of those levels of acclaim that transcends simple recognition. There was something about it that made it come across as a once in a generation achievement. Paul Mescal singlehandedly brought the film into The Oscars with a performance that I was promised would be among the best I have seen. With so much anticipation, there’s always the risk of being disappointed. Would this film not deliver the same highs that almost everyone had promised? Pressing play, I was the most excited I had been for a film in eons. What I didn’t expect (because I didn’t discover the plot beforehand) was how much I would love it, becoming a film almost as essential in exploring 21st-century grief as Petite Maman (2021).
I remain speechless. Whatever I write here may not be able to fully encapsulate the realm of emotion I have been carried in since. My mind has spent the past few hours dissecting the final dance number set to Queen’s “Under Pressure.” The editing in the sequence has the power that every film should have. It cuts between the past and fantasy, tying together an emotion I hadn’t seen expressed so clearly before. In the past, there’s Calum (Mescal) encouraging his 11-year-old daughter Sophie (Frankie Corio) to dance with him on the last day of a birthday trip. Meanwhile, there is an ambiguous rave setting, the lights popping in and out with their uncomfortable uncertainty. In one corner is adult Sophie (Celia Rowlson-Hall) and the other is Calum, perpetually 31. The darkness contrasts with the lightness in such a way that requires some thought, but it’s here where suddenly everything makes sense.
We have been following the film from Adult Sophie’s perspective. She is looking into the past, specifically through old home videos, to try and understand a man she had barely known. Calum, her father, may have shared a lot with her, but there’s even more that a child is not exposed to. The audience is, at best, given glimpses into fringes of this behavior whether biased interpretation of actuality is not given. Still, much like Adult Sophie’s arc happening on the day of her birthday, the audience follows Calum on his. Director Charlotte Wells doesn’t give us easy answers and I’m not fully sure why Sophie is looking back. Maybe it’s for comfort or to find some greater connection. Then again, why does anyone pursue memories?
I suppose that I start at the end because Wells has crafted one of the absolute best endings to a film likely ever. The dance sequence is not the end – and what lies beyond is even more of a gut punch. However, I stop here because Wells accomplishes something unique with that editing. As there are incorporations of people jumping into the water and Calum crying in his hotel room, there’s a lot of reason to suggest the worst has happened off-screen. The reason we see so many innocuous shots of Calum in water is because of some hidden trauma. She keeps returning to the memory less because it’s meaningful but wishing to find something within it that will console her struggles.
Before I dive into the rest of the film, I may as well explain why the editing in the “Under Pressure” sequence is beyond masterful. To me, the rave scenes aren’t reality. They’re fantasy, likely Adult Sophie’s, in which she envisions her father dancing through her head. It ties together the various flashbacks and ends with one of the most upsetting moments in the entire film. As Freddie Mercury’s lyrics cry “Why can’t we give love one more chance?” Adult Sophie runs to Calum. She is unable to as the lights go out. With one last desperate move, tied so meticulously to the final happy moment in the film, she finally reaches him. To me, this is Sophie doing her damnedest to not forget who Calum was. Slowly he slips from her brain, and the effort to not have him reduced to victim status is in itself overwhelming.
Maybe it’s because remembering is a mission statement for The Memory Tourist, but I deeply related to both sides of the central struggle. On Sophie’s side, I recognized the pain of loss. At a certain point, you cannot as easily remember the good in lasting relationships. If someone’s demise was surrounded by tragedy or bad health, you’re likely to have the good times erased in favor of the overwhelming sense of grief. If you’re lucky, there will be documentation to resurrect their identity in personal and even beautiful ways. I think this is what Sophie was always trying to do. Even if certain sides of Calum are forever closed off to her now, she can try to find meaning in what was there. She can move beyond the regret of conversations not had and find the humanity of a father who may have felt inadequate at times.
Calum is one of the great characters of 21st-century cinema. The audience knows him, and yet maybe doesn’t. It feels reminiscent of I Knew Her Well (1965), an Italian film that observed a woman whose own relationship with the narrator was distant but conveyed something more about the narrator than the subject. Calum is at least given moments to contemplate on screen. He is seen bargaining over a rug. Why does he want the rug? It won’t factor at all into the further plot, and yet Wells centers on it even with Sophie out of the room. Moments like these encourage the audience to connect the dots of how these characters think and look for comfort in the world around them.
Calum is introduced with an arm brace on. While I initially took the bumps on his arms as self-harm scars, I may just be mistaken for very veiny arms. Even then, there’s a sense of stress that radiates through his body. It hides behind a smile that encourages him to laugh and make Sophie’s life better. Much like how people suggested Robin Williams loved to make people laugh because he knew what it meant to hurt emotionally, Calum follows that school of thought. He is there for her. To see her succeed is the one thing that gives his life meaning. He isn’t an overbearing father, but more one young enough to understand her need for freedom once in a while. He is, by all accounts, a good father. At no point is that contested. However, one initially wonders why Aftersun was filmed the way it was.
In one scene, Sophie is filming Calum in a hotel room. The audience doesn’t get to see this exchange head-on. Any visuals are seen through a mirror and a TV that projects Sophie’s recording. There’s a playfulness at first, but the longer that the shot holds on this inanimate scenery, the more it realizes something even more painful about the film to come. While there’s a lot that Sophie can recall from documentation, the conversations that matter the most aren’t on there. The audience doesn’t get to see it maybe because Sophie can’t imagine it in her memory. The few moments of seriousness are when there’s not a camera around. Without a camera, there’s no reason to “put on a show” as it were, and fake a smile. Without Sophie, Calum’s in an even worse condition, feeling alone and useless.
As tragic as it is to suggest, Calum’s story is familiar at times. For the viewers who understand depression or the general concept of imposter syndrome, Calum’s story is all too painful and real. You do what you can to make the world around you a better place, but there may be something that feels absent deep down. No matter how much nobility is done, no matter how many times someone says “I love you,” there is an inability to accept it as a simple fact. Who is Calum without Sophie? There’s not a lot of evidence. The few clues point to, among other things, a homosexual relationship that in the 1990s would’ve been even more taboo given The AIDS Epidemic. Maybe there’s inadequacy around being a single father, like he failed at the concept of marriage. Again, Wells doesn’t give us the answers. The viewer is left to determine if what we’re even seeing is more than a warped vision of Sophie’s memory.
Even if it is, I’d argue that it works as more than some lazy riff on The Usual Suspects (1995). What is seen is the byproduct of how memory works decades on when the events are long passed. There is no easy way to access that summer or even recall if Sophie took that last dance. Everyone plays around with their own vision of themselves and others as time goes on. You want to remember them as their best selves. When it’s assumed that Calum died by suicide, I can predict that there’s trauma around it in Sophie’s intervening years. Maybe there’s her own mental health struggles that developed as she lost her innocence. It’s not known, but if that’s the case… maybe this is all just a quest to remember what it’s like to be happy.
Which is the thing with trauma. As someone who until recently had no recollection of most of my life in the 90s, I assumed that some bad experiences caused me to not remember a time before it. Sure, I was 11 in 2000, so the idea of not remembering due to aging is just as valid of an excuse, but even then I found something bizarre happen when I forced myself to see beyond the sadness. Pushing through it, no matter how painful, allowed me to remember the earlier years in bits and pieces. Together they formed a sense of a happier child whose life wasn’t always miserable. I was allowed to laugh and smile at random things again. It’s maybe why I am too defensive and sentimental about nostalgia as a concept, especially over the past three years. It’s more than cynical money-grabbing. It can be genuine therapy.
So to me, Aftersun is many things indirectly, but it’s most of all a search for happiness. I look at the image of Calum and Adult Sophie in that rave lighting and I see an experience I’ve been battling with as I grow older and more people fade from my life. I want to push him back into the light, to not have the lasting vision be one of darkness and despair. Maybe it can never be fully grasped. Maybe it will only slip away more. However, the effort to push forward and try to pull him out speaks to me. Mercury cries “Why can’t we give love one more chance?” like a cry of regret. For those who know depression in any way, it’s easy to see the correlation of that line as many things. Depending on who’s speaking it, maybe it’s Sophie wanting to speak to Calum as an adult to learn about experiences. Maybe it’s from Calum finding love as a reason to live again. Everything melds together in a profound way that grows the longer I think about it.
Most of all, I don’t think a viewer can fully appreciate what this film achieves for the first third of it. Sure, the performances are enjoyable and there’s an authenticity to the chemistry. However, I think you’re at best disconcerted by the framework that Wells is sharing. Why do the cameras matter? What’s with all the water? Why is there so much emphasis on Calum’s arm brace? So many things already get the mind spinning, but the confident direction means we don’t get the answers. We get what we think is the answer, and that’s often more exciting than fiction. It allows the specific premise to become more universal.
And, of course, the final actual scene of Aftersun is one of the best endings I’ve ever witnessed. It’s so simple and yet because of how events are ordered, I come to see them in very different ways. It’s the point where the past and fantasy officially meet. It’s like glimpsing into how a thought becomes internalized. I hesitate to actually discuss it because of how surprising it was and how simple camera motions played a big part in my enjoyment of it. What the viewer is left with is probably their own personal feelings. Those calling Aftersun a memory are not wrong. If anything, it’s one that is far less surreal than the nightmares of David Lynch. It’s actually scarier for those who see themselves in either lead. It’s even more paralyzing if you’re like me and can see little parts of yourself in both. Even then, being able to look past fear can sometimes be beautiful, and that’s what this film captures incredibly well.
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