"Aftersun" - Film Review
Most of Aftersun plays out like a home movie. A hazy memory of young Sophie’s (Frankie Corio) childhood vacation to Turkey with her father, Calum (Paul Mescal). It’s a memory she returns to often as she grows older (Celia Rowlson-Hall) and tries to understand her father. It’s a futile effort, one that’s the focus of a multitude of films. It’s extraordinarily difficult to truly know someone, and even harder if that someone is a parent. It’s the only type of relationship that fundamentally alters as time goes on, before culminating in a role reversal.
Aftersun manages to capture the liminal nature of vacations. It’s an opportunity to break from life’s regular patterns and try on a new persona. You’re surrounded by strangers, surrounded by the possibility of anonymity, especially in the 1990s when social media is at least a decade away. Sophie is desperate to hold onto these moments with her father, but she’s also swept up in a desire to be older. She befriends teens at the resort while playing pool and idolizes them, aching to fast forward her own life to have their freedom. Corio is an exceptional young actor, balancing grace and youthful ignorance to create a character who feels genuine.
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It’s not only Sophie who’s coming to terms with the progression of time, it’s Calum too. He’s turning thirty-one and clearly troubled with where his life is. It’s very clear that he adores Sophie, and this vacation is a rare extended amount of time he gets to spend with her. Calum asks how she likes living with her mom and implores her to tell him things when she gets older. He’s asking her to do what he cannot do. As much as he loves Sophie, he doesn’t know how to be a father. He’s still figuring things out. His romantic life never took off, he has no career to speak of, and he feels listless. Yet he is responsible for caring for another human being.
Aftersun is left open-ended, and that’s a perfect conclusion to this portrait of a father and daughter relationship. It speaks to the inability of a child to truly understand their parents, no matter how valiantly they try. An audience member could read the film’s final moments as an implication that Calum is no longer in Sophie’s life anymore, but there’s no definite answer. Is Calum alive, but they’re simply no longer speaking? Or are the note he wrote to Sophie during their Turkish vacation and the videos they shot together all Sophie has left? The audience doesn’t know and doesn’t need to. It’s a harsh reality of life that some answers will not be given, no matter how hard we try to put the puzzle together.
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