Notes on Aftersun
I just wanted to put on my little analysis hat and talk about Aftersun, a film I think is brilliant and one that more people need to see.
Aftersun is a relatively simple film. It doesn’t contain difficult iconography, a complex plot, or ambiguous themes, but it does reject a traditional narrative, which I think a lot of people have a hard time connecting with. It’s a reconstruction of memory, Charlotte Wells using her characters to try and cement her past, to try and make sense of it. But, what proves difficult is that there’s no sense to be made. The film searches for answers, but answers are never the point.
I think that’s the part that intrigues me the most about this film. Its subjects, young father Calum and his eleven-year-old daughter Sophie, are the film's narrative purpose, not just vehicles for it. Calum is undoubtedly the subject of inquiry for the film; Sophie, using tapes from their vacation in Turkey, is trying to fabricate some sort of meaning, or come to some conclusion about her father—parsing through the digital records and her own memories for clues that could explain something that happens to him shortly after their trip. It’s never explicitly stated what happens to Calum; all we have are the few shots of an older Sophie and the pain of her memories.
Though Calum is our focus, the film rarely leaves Sophie’s perspective. Indeed, there are only a spare few shots of Calum alone. Most of the time we see him he’s in the presence of his daughter; but those precious few scenes we get of him alone, where we’re able to see him interact with the world and himself without the constructions—the veils he’s built for his daughter’s sake—are crucial to understanding the film, and what becomes of Calum.
I thought about putting a spoiler warning at the beginning of this post, but in truth, I don’t think there’s anything to actually spoil. Aftersun is not a film with a conventional plot. There’s no inciting incident, no rising conflict, no climax or fallout in the common sense; none of the things that we expect from a traditional story. And that’s because this isn’t a story: it’s a collage of memories. It’s a vision board—pictures and memories and vistas cut and glued to a wall, linked together with strings of cotton. That’s not to say the viewer is helpless; in fact, there are a few genius scenes laced throughout the film that tell us all we need to know. Nor is it to say that the film suffers because of it—in fact, I think the film is incredibly emotionally effective, and particularly unique in the way it melds together experience, memory, and videography.
It’s clear that Calum is a troubled man, but from what we are shown of him during this vacation in Turkey, he seems to be a good father. He tries to be present, even if he is sometimes drawn into himself; but Sophie clearly loves him, and he clearly loves her. And that’s the problem that I think plagues the older Sophie, the problem that the film is delving into: If he was loved, and he loved, then what was wrong with him?
We get clues sprinkled throughout the film, some from the language of his body—his expressions, the implications of certain shots and how the camera lingers on him. But we are also told explicitly, such as when Calum is talking to the scuba instructor, and says that he couldn’t imagine being 40, and that he didn’t think he’d make it to 30. Not to mention the fact that he later takes a careless midnight swim, potentially not planning to make it to the morning. We know Calum suffers from poor mental health, the specifics of which we’re never really told. It’s clear he suffers from anxiety, which he tries to combat with tai chi.
What we do know is that he has a troubled past. Were told so in one of the most compelling scenes in the film.
The shot is endowed with perspective: Sophie filming her father with their new digital camera; the feed shown on the TV; the real-time reflection of camera in the TVs glass; the blurry reflection of Sophie/Calum in the hotel room’s mirror mounted beside the TV. This jumbled assortment of perspectives is intentional. Sophie, newly turned eleven, asks her father what he wanted to be when he was her age. The question immediately dampens the playful mood, Calum growing solemn and asking her to shut off the camera. She complies, and says she’ll record him in her “mind-camera”. This is pertinent to the film as a whole—an almost meta acknowledgement of the fragmented form of the narrative. Older Sophie is piecing the strings together using both the physical footage of the digital camera, and the immaterial footage of her memory.
Calum tells her in this scene that his parents didn’t even remember his eleventh birthday, and that when he reminded his mother, she dragged him to the store and forced him to pick something out. This explains Calum’s anxieties towards his birthday, and why later when on an excursion he is so moved (as well as visibly somber) when Sophie gets the other tourists to sing his birthday.
I think the biggest clue of his destiny is given in the scene where him and Sophie are settling in for the night after a busy day. Sophie is laying on the hotel room bed, speaking her mind while Calum brushes his teeth,
Don’t you ever feel like you’ve just done a whole amazing day, and then you come home, and feel tired, and down, and it feels like your bones don’t work. They’re just tired, and everything is tired. Like you’re sinking.
We get a shot of Calum looking up at himself in the bathroom mirror, unsure of how to respond. He spits at his image in the mirror.
This scene is telling, and perhaps the greatest evidence we have for what eventually happens to Calum after their vacation. When Sophie says this, Calum leers at his reflection with vitriol. He knows exactly what she is talking about, how she feels. He feels like he passed down his illness to her—he blames himself, and curses the person in the mirror.
It’s easy to look at Calum’s potentially fatal decision and its consequences—the effects they had on his daughter—and deem them selfish. But that is the judgement of a sound mind. Mental illness operates on a wholly different form of logic—a desperate, existential kind. It’s warped, frantic. Calum feels like he has an affliction, a sickness in his soul, and he feels that he’s passed it onto his daughter, that he’s feeding it by proxy.
One of the things I find so fascinating about this film is how much its sat in Sophie’s world. For us, there’s no doubts that something concerning, perhaps even fatal, happens to Calum after their vacation. The film is laden with hints—practically screaming with subtext. But we never leave Sophie’s perspective. Instead, we’re given these little stills—almost like polaroids—of intimate memory. Wells captures those vivid, often quiet moments that stick with us from childhood perfectly. “Madeleine moments”, as Proust would call them.
In another sort of meta-moment near the very end of the film, we’re given a heartbreaking montage of Calum dancing on the last day of their vacation, cut with an older Sophie in what I’ll call the “memory rave”—a dark club with a disorientating strobe light that’s been teased throughout the film. Young Sophie watches her father happily and goofily dancing to Queen’s “Under Pressure”, the film literally telling us over and over as the older Sophie grapples with her dancing father in her subconscious that
This is our last dance.
This is our last dance.
This is our last dance.
This heart-rending scene is the crux of the film, the nexus of the project. Young Sophie, watching her father carelessly dancing; the older Sophie, caught in a confused and angry grapple with that image of her father. It’s grief-logic; a confrontation, a battle. Older Sophie is confronting the image, the fractal memory of her father happily dancing, trying desperately to reconcile how someone could look so happy, could even dance, when they’re in so much pain, so much pain that they’d potentially abandon life, abandon her. We see the young Sophie taking the place of her older self in the club, the version of herself forever preserved, the version that never got to grow up with her father.
Whether Calum truly dies is unclear, but what’s evident is that for Sophie, he dies a death of some kind. This distortion of reality and memory creates for Sophie the paradox of holding the dead accountable. She can rack her mind, scour the evidence, search for answers—but nothing will make any sense, because there’s no sense to make, none that abides sound logic. The questions will continue to haunt her if she can’t let them go, if she can’t stop antagonizing those memories and let them exist, if she can’t let her child self free.
Aftersun is one of the best films of the year. It traverses painful territory so gracefully, so thoughtfully, and it does the best thing it could do—tell the story of Sophie through her own eyes, feelings, and memories. GO WATCH IT!