Charlotte Wells, 2022 · 101 minutes · MUBI, Max
Charlotte Wells made Aftersun as her debut feature and made one of the most quietly devastating films in recent cinema. The premise is modest: a young woman looks back on a holiday she took with her father when she was eleven, trying to understand what she was too young to see at the time. The film exists in the gap between what the child perceived and what the adult now suspects, and it lives there with extraordinary restraint.
Paul Mescal plays the father, Calum, with the particular quality of someone performing ease — making things fun for his daughter while something underneath is not fine. This is difficult acting because it requires him to show two states simultaneously without tipping into either one. He does it. Frankie Corio, playing Sophie at eleven, is extraordinary — not in the way child actors are usually praised, meaning she seems natural and unaffected, but in the deeper way: she is present in every scene in a way that makes you feel the weight of what she does not understand.
Wells constructs the film from fragments — home video footage, memories, impressions — and gives you the pieces without telling you how to assemble them. The horror of the film, if horror is the right word, arrives slowly, and it arrives because you have been paying attention. Nothing is spelled out. Everything is there.
Watch it once and it will stay with you. Think about it afterward — the dancing scene at the end, in particular — and you will understand something about grief and memory and the limits of what we can know about the people we love.
VERDICT — A debut of exceptional assurance. One of the best films of recent years, full stop.
POUR — Something from wherever you are. A local wine, something you have been meaning to open. This film deserves your good bottle.
MOOD — Attentive. Patient. Ready to feel something without knowing quite what.
Plan this morning with a Date Night guide: The Sunday Late Breakfast.
Some films belong on the shelf. Find it on Blu-ray.
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