Aftersun by Charlotte Wells
Ivan Magrin-Chagnolleau
When Memory Illuminates Absence
Aftersun is one of those rare gems one sometimes has the privilege to witness. I was deeply moved by this film.
The story, seemingly ordinary, follows the holiday of an eleven‑year‑old girl, Sophie (Frankie Corio), spent with her young father, Calum (Paul Mescal), in a resort in Turkey. We sense that her parents are divorced, that the time she shares with her father is precious and scarce. These holidays therefore become a ritual, a suspended space, the very essence of an extraordinary experience for a Scottish child suddenly transported into a dazzling elsewhere.
As the film progresses, we understand that this particular holiday carries a special aura. Is it because the young girl experiences her first kiss? Or — as the film’s subtle narration suggests — because these are the last holidays she will ever spend with her father? Perhaps even the last time she saw him. This ambiguity, this unspoken tension, creates a singular emotion: that of a joyful memory turned painfully nostalgic by the passage of time.
For Aftersun, directed by Charlotte Wells, is above all a film about grief — or rather, about the way memories, luminous, tender, fragile, gradually become the remnants of a past we are still trying to understand. Everything is seen through the eyes of the adult the young girl has become, revisiting her childhood through the flicker of a memory that wavers.
The strength of the film lies most of all in its direction. Every choice made by the filmmaker is strikingly precise, each scene revealing an idea, a gesture, a brilliant intuition. Several sequences linger long after the screening. For instance, the moment when the father goes for a swim late at night. He disappears into the darkness of the waves, while the sound design — masterful — plunges the viewer into a quiet, unsettling tension. For a moment, one wonders whether he has chosen to slip away for good, leaving his daughter alone in their hotel room. The next scene, shifting the temporal frame, gives meaning back to this disappearance, yet the emotional imprint remains.
Another striking choice is the use of the video camera, passed back and forth between father and daughter. These grainy, imperfect images become the tangible fragments of a memory attempting to reconstruct itself. They embody at once distance, affection, complicity, and the difficulty of retrospectively understanding those we have loved.
Aftersun is a film of rare delicacy — a poem about memory, lineage, and those everyday moments that become, without our knowing it, the last ones. A work whose light continues to shimmer long after the screen has gone dark.