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Scottish filmmaker Charlotte Wells' debut feature Aftersun collapses the boundary between form and content. For this, it can be compared to other 21st century films such as Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001), Climax (Gaspar Noé, 2018), and Hit the Road (Panah Panahi, 2021). In each, the narrative focus becomes the entire film – Mulholland Drive is a surrealist, Hollywood-set mystery simultaneously being solved by its characters and spectator. Climax’s minimal story is of dancers rehearsing in an empty school building, so its 90-minute runtime only consists of this hypnotic dancing, shot in long takes. Hit the Road is about a claustrophobic family car trip, and bends its realism and allows characters to break the fourth wall, as if the film is directly addressing how it is restricting its spectator to this trip with these characters.

Continuing this approach, Aftersun is both about the instability of memory and the pain of psychological struggle and is these things, structurally and aesthetically. Wells’ film follows 11-year-old Sophie (played by Frankie Corio) and her 30-year-old father Calum (Paul Mescal) on a summer holiday to Turkey, shortly after Calum and Sophie’s mother (who appears in one scene, at the other end of a phone line) have separated and he has moved from Edinburgh to London. Aftersun seeks to resolve adult Sophie (Celia Rowlson-Hall)’s process of reassembling her fractured memories of her Dad’s struggle with depression by becoming this process. Adult Sophie learns new details as we do, seeing things that went unnoticed at the time after showing the spectator what happened. She is effectively watching the film of her childhood trip with us. This reading is strengthened by a scene near the end of the film in which the frame we are seeing briefly appears on the wall of her apartment as the film cuts back to the present when she is an adult living with her female partner and their baby. As an 11-year-old, she records large periods of the trip on her MiniDV camera, footage which the film presents to us under the illusion of authenticity. It is possible that she has dug out the old tapes with her partner and watched them, triggering the film’s full depiction of these partially recorded memories.

Aftersun addresses Calum’s depression (and its effect on Sophie’s life) through unpredictable editing, imagined interlude scenes, moments of structural nonlinearity, different types of fractured space, and long silences both when characters are in frame and when they are not. These are what I am calling Aftersun’s struggle aesthetics. The film enlarges Calum’s struggle – seen through his daughter’s eyes, creating an additional, second-hand struggle – by replicating it. Wells emphasises gestures and facial expressions when dialogue does not come freely to her characters. Words are impeded in Sophie’s case by a child’s naivety, and in her Dad’s case by his mental illness. Aftersun is equally interested in the space between words and sounds – pauses both for breath and to take in the external surroundings. Like her Dad, but for the different reason of being a shy child discovering her sexuality, Sophie  sometimes looks rather than says. The camera matches this gaze, showing the spectator what is being looked at rather than the looker. At one point, this is a clear blue sky dotted with paragliders. Sophie and Calum watch them together, agreeing-without-saying that they are envious of the gliders’ uninhibited freedom. In these instances, we understand what Calum means when, in reference to Edinburgh, he says: “I never felt like I really did belong there.” We understand that this displacement is not unique to the Scottish city. This more debilitating feeling, which after a long day his daughter describes to him as a “sinking”, is how Calum feels all the time, everywhere.

There are moments when Aftersun creates fractured spaces differently, complicating this paragliders scene and the father and daughter’s shared escapist desire. After another day at the budget resort, Wells includes a natural split screen (created by the set rather than in the editing suite) that separates Sophie from Calum, reminding us that their experiences of isolation and confusion may appear similar, but are fundamentally different. Sophie fills the silence while lying on the bed, whereas Calum sits on the toilet next door, cleaning his arm that is in a cast. She is often more able to fill silence than her Dad is. His head is propped up by his good arm, and it seems that the gesture is less the result of his cast arm’s discomfort and more because he is exhausted, mentally. As his daughter put it, without realising that she was so accurately talking about her Dad, he is sinking. Sophie and Calum’s periods of downtime in their hotel room often remind us of her Dad’s inability to tell her what he is going through, which she only understands retrospectively as an adult.

This communicational obstacle is why Sophie is casting her mind back to this trip, when it seems she either experienced something unique with her Dad (beyond their first holiday together without her Mum), or lost something from their relationship. The film only hints and never confirms – sustaining its accurate depiction of the often puzzling condition of depression – but it is possible that adult Sophie is no longer talking to her Dad. Or much worse, he is no longer with us. Via structural and chronological nonlinearity, Aftersun forecasts this future of untaken or impossible opportunities for Sophie to talk to her Dad in a scene where he tells her: “You know you can talk to me about anything, as you get older.” The conversation carries on as the film cuts to shots of the lake they are looking out at. Calum’s invitation for his daughter to open up with him relates to their discussion of drugs and sex, but contradicts something he says earlier to a friendly member of resort staff when Sophie is not in earshot: “I can’t see myself at 40, to be honest. Surprised I made it to 30.”

In another scene, Calum teaches his daughter how to defend herself with her arms, as if his own arm injury offers a cautionary tale, but also as if he might not always be around to protect her (or help her protect herself). The training is an escalation of Sophie’s participation in Calum’s Tai chi, which he does periodically throughout the film, to relax his nerves. In the defence training, Calum does not let Sophie have fun and mess around: “This is serious, Sophie. It’s important you get this.” Adult Sophie’s memories of the holiday vary from fun activities for an 11-year-old (that seem special, given the references to her Dad’s tricky financial situation) to smaller moments of paternal connection – whether intimate or alarming, like the defence training. At different stages, they play pool, cards, and water polo. They go on a boat trip, scuba diving, and to a carpet shop near the resort. Calum gives her money to go and play at the arcades with a boy she meets and later kisses. Calum braids her hair. He puts sun cream on her back, asking how home life with her Mum is. Anticipating their separation, despite these moments of connection, the arcade session leads to another, and the game of pool leads to further ones with the older boys, but no longer with her Dad there too. Sophie and her Dad also drink together, but the activity shares space, not experience, with her having a soft drink and him drinking alcohol.

Sophie and Calum’s (im)balance of separation and connection is expanded by the film’s chronological split. The unpredictable flashforwards to the present give their different struggles a shared disorienting effect. An aesthetic choice with a similar impact is the film’s interspersed, abbreviated scenes in a nightclub. These fall somewhere between dream sequence and second-hand flashback, returning to and extending the same footage in which Calum dances erratically (and, it seems, drunkenly) to the music. The film does not confirm it, but it seems as if adult Sophie is imagining how her parents met. She adopts her Mum’s perspective and spots Calum from the opposite end of the dance floor, then approaches him over the course of these interlude scenes. But the music is always too loud and her Dad is always too distracted by it: the film language of struggle, which is added to by the scene’s strobe lighting. Wells plays with sound on other occasions in Aftersun, slowing down and manipulating the Blur track ‘Tender’, and stripping the instrumentation away for an acapella version of Queen and David Bowie’s ‘Under Pressure.’ With diegetic music, Wells creates a similar effect of breakdown and malfunction, as we see when Calum leaves Sophie to sing R. E. M.’s ‘Losing My Religion’ on her own after she signs them up for the resort’s karaoke night. He does not want to let his daughter down but insists that he cannot get up on a stage.

Calum’s detachment from his daughter is underlined by Aftersun’s cut. At different points of Wells’ film, harsh, abrupt, and unpredictable editing results in Calum suddenly appearing at the beach, walking out to sea alone (without us seeing how he got there); adult Sophie’s partner wishing her a “happy birthday” before we jump back to the end of the Turkey holiday, when Sophie wishes her Dad the same; and a warm singalong of ‘He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’ from strangers (led by Sophie) being replaced by Calum sobbing and shaking on his bed, alone. Aftersun is also a film about editing, because Sophie’s recorded memories are a means of not only revisiting and remembering, but also altering her future after learning new information or making new observations that passed her by as a child. It is a film about the transformative potential editing brings, and the limitations of recorded experience when compared with lived experience.

Enacting this, Wells’ film shows us a note Calum has scribbled down for Sophie towards the end of the holiday, which we do not see him give to her, nor see her find and read. To read the note (other than its addressee, which is easy to make out), we have to pause the film, which of course is impossible at the cinema. Even at home, when we ourselves are revisiting, Calum’s handwriting is difficult to read, leaving our understanding of the note – its content, its intention, its impact – unclear. As a film, Aftersun is a macro version of the polaroid a local takes of Calum and Sophie in a restaurant on their last day in Turkey, which he sells to them. Wells lingers on a shot of the polaroid on the table, as its details are filling out and coming into focus. Equally, Aftersun may be an existing piece of art that is out in the world, but the experience of watching it is impermanent. By its end, the details are there to see; but these details do not grant straightforward understanding, because such a destination is impossible in the context of mental health.          

Avoiding the convenience of clear answers or simple truths, Aftersun prefers to tactically (and masterfully) navigate the complexity of authentic struggle. Its echo chamber of connections and separations can perhaps be summarised by the most fascinating shot in the film. In their hotel room, Sophie records her Dad, asking him: “When you were eleven, what did you think you would be doing now?” The scene opens Aftersun and is then met halfway through the runtime, as the narrative catches up with this moment. They have the MiniDV plugged in, so the results of her recording are instantly appearing on the room’s TV. The spectator sees these results while simultaneously seeing Sophie recording her Dad, thanks to a mirror to the left of the TV. When Calum becomes uncomfortable with the line of questioning and asks her both to stop and unplug the camera from the TV, we see her and Calum through a different second screen, because her camera is off, but Aftersun’s is not. Alongside the mirror, the reflection in the black TV screen shows their interaction. Here and throughout the film, Wells uses aesthetics as a prism to refract fictionalised experience – which in an interview for The Guardian she confessed takes from her own life, calling Aftersun “personal filmmaking”, if not straight autobiography. Cinema’s prism causes these experiences – these struggles – to change direction and bend. Holding Aftersun up to the light, we will see new things each time we revisit it. New understandings and feelings will follow, depending on the angle from which we hold it.        

Film Reviews   charlotte web   depression in cinema   film style   scottish cinema