The movie
Aftersun
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 as she tries to reconcile the father she knew with the man she didn't.
Length: 98 min
Country: United Kingdom, Turkey, United States
Language spoken: English
Language subtitles: Dutch
Cast: Paul Mescal, Frankie Corio, Celia Rowlson-Hall.
Director: Charlotte Wells
Release date: 2022
Description
Young teenager Sophie and her thirty-year-old father Calum go on holiday to a Turkish seaside resort where they swim, play pool, sunbathe, and laze about. While a new world opens up for the young teenager, Calum struggles with the heaviness of life out of Sophie's sight. Twenty years later, Sophie's tender memories of this vacation form a powerful and heartbreaking portrait of their relationship, as she tries to understand the dark side of her loving father.
‘Wells’s debut feature is a stylistically daring, emotionally piercing and beautifully understated tale of love and loss… Appropriately for a work that is clearly profoundly personal, Wells says the roots of “Aftersun” lay in flipping through holiday albums of herself as a child and being struck by how young her father looked. Later, she came across a photo in which she was sitting by a pool in Spain, with “a very beautiful woman right behind me… and it made me wonder who the real subject of the picture was”. That sense of mystery runs throughout this mesmerising feature, which, despite being set largely in the past, nonetheless feels peculiarly present.’—Mark Kermode, The Observer
'Aftersun' review: This is the best film of the year by a first time writer-director
\"Aftersun\" debuted at the Cannes Film Festival and left a lasting impression.
‘Wells’s debut feature is a stylistically daring, emotionally piercing and beautifully understated tale of love and loss… Appropriately for a work that is clearly profoundly personal, Wells says the roots of “Aftersun” lay in flipping through holiday albums of herself as a child and being struck by how young her father looked. Later, she came across a photo in which she was sitting by a pool in Spain, with “a very beautiful woman right behind me… and it made me wonder who the real subject of the picture was”. That sense of mystery runs throughout this mesmerising feature, which, despite being set largely in the past, nonetheless feels peculiarly present.’—Mark Kermode, The Observer
'Aftersun' review: This is the best film of the year by a first time writer-director
\"Aftersun\" debuted at the Cannes Film Festival and left a lasting impression.
Reviews
"A subtle and complex investigation of post-divorce parenthood”
