The Incredible Specifics and Unsaid of AFTERSUN (Patreon)

I feel like I spent a decade in film festivals watching movies that wanted to be like Aftersun, but didn’t know the key to making a movie like Aftersun. I’ve talked about the dynamic before, but there were so many small budget, independent-minded movies that had this habit of hiding, well, just about everything. They would hide story information, relationship contexts, and basic intentions as they slowly just revealed their basic premise over the course of two hours. Even their use of symbolism felt muddled and vague instead of merely abstract. In short, they were the kind of effort where the filmmakers really just seemed like they had no idea what they wanted to say, just the kind of movie they wanted it to feel like. Which isn’t a cardinal sin or anything, some people are into that. But I find that it’s the kind of approach that rarely engages an audience outside of an incredibly, INCREDIBLY small subset. The kind of film that festival audiences will be talking about and saying things like “yeah, you should see this movie, it’s interesting.” Without realizing that movie merely being interesting is one of those stealthy death knell terms. Because even a small budget, independent-minded movie ultimately has to be either transfixing or moving to really connect with people watching.

But to also be clear, I fully get the inclination to make films that play more in the realm of subtlety. Because while I also spend a lot of time talking about dramatic clarity with big Hollywood stuff, the comparable intention of smaller films is to make works that feel more intimate and human. That doesn't play up the drama of some overarching outside conflict (like aliens attacking or something), but instead invites someone into a far more delicate reality. And that's the whole thing: delicate art can feel just as powerful, if not moreso. And a film like Aftersun is a remarkable example of how. For it highlights all the ways you can bring people into an intimate, well-drawn world with hyper-specific details, all while showing the incredible power you can feel from the unsaid.

Now, what I love specifically about this film is the way it plays into another dynamic I talk about which is the setting of small, personal stakes. That’s because Hollywood often treats stakes like it’s simple math. Like “The new death star thingy isn’t the size of a moon, it’s a whole planet! And it won't just blow up a single planet, it will blow up a whole bunch of planets! Get it!? It’s bigger stakes!” Without ever realizing we just won’t give a shit about people we’ve never met on screen. Because we don’t care about the end of the world, we care about what we care about. That is to say, we care about the things that feel like they’re our whole world. Which, once again, is what Aftersun does remarkably.

It’s the story of a young, thirty year old Scottish dad named Calum and his eleven year old daughter Sophie (you can do the math). And it chronicles his simple attempt to bring her on a nice vacation to Turkey, where she can have a good time despite his clear financial struggles. That’s pretty much just it. They aren’t kidnapped and no terrible thing threatens them. But him wanting her to have a nice time feels like the only thing that matters in the world. They’re both just so nice and kind and genuine, but with their own oddball personalities - and it makes the stakes feel so humongous, yet, to use that word again, so incredibly delicate. Which means the film itself can mine the most touching conflict from the smallest specifics of action. And it is there that so much of the film truly comes to life.

If you haven’t seen the film, honestly, just go rent it because it’s spoilers from here on I guess? Not that it’s really the kind of movie that can be spoiled. I supposed I just wanted to warn because so much of the power of the film in the way these little details tell the story of what’s really happening between them. For one, there are all these surface details that may feel so achingly familiar. It’s the mid-level vacation hotel with its little financial hierarchies and wristbands. The dated vacation outfits and mid-height socks. The old, sun-bleached outdoor arcade machines. And of course, The MiniDV camcorder that sometimes chronicles their journey (we’ll come back to this). The film’s actual camera drifts and fixates on many of these objects, contributing the hazy memory-like feeling that touches the whole picture. But ultimately, so much of Sophie’s story isn’t about objects, but the little nuggets of socialization, like the painful familiarity of the interactions with other kids, both her age and older. Other movies would turn this into pained, amped up social hell. But there everything stays so achingly - to keep using that word - delicate. And also telling of character, like the little way Sophie glances off to the side during her first kiss and the way it draws a line to her queerness later in life.

So much of the story of her relationship with her father is told in the smallest of actions. Like the way dad is clearly tearing off his cast before he should, just so he can go scuba diving with her, which is such a clear gesture of him putting her before himself. And this kind of push / pull is everywhere. It’s every little thing he can’t afford, like the beautiful rug that he keeps finding himself returning to, and ultimately buying anyway. There’s just this clear way he’s not thinking long term. It’s about her in the now. And it’s not as if the present is without fail, for there’s that simple sequence of him being afraid of them laying about by the pool, so he eggs her into a game of playing water polo, even though she’s clearly uninterested. All we need to do is see that simple shot of her lost in the middle, trying, as he screams about playing out of frame. It’s a film that is constantly showing us that there is something deeper going on. Something unsaid. And all the ways it clues us into “what” are completely heartbreaking.

One of the most important moments comes about a third of the way into the movie, where they’re doing this thing they sometimes do, where he’s talking to her from the bathroom and they can’t see each other’s faces (itself, a metaphor). He’s asking how she’s doing and she is staring at the ceiling and says that even though something was fun, she’s feeling a different kind of tired and sad, “like you’re sinking” and you instantly see the knowing sadness and horror on his face. Because she doesn’t realize she’s describing the onset of depression, and for him, he is so trapped in his own deep depression. So you see it all, from the guilt and the feeling like he’s exposing it to her, as if he somehow cursed her - to the deep empathy, because he knows what this is going to be like for her. And if all that’s not devastating enough, it all hints to something deeper. Because there’s a question that’s hanging over the whole film…

What’s wrong with dad?

But the genius of the film is what certain scenes imply or leave unsaid. This allows us to, on one level, take all that he says at face value. That simply had an amicable divorce. That he thinks her teachers are pretty. That he likes to party and drink a little too much. And that Sophie merely can’t connect because he’s keeping that part of himself separate. That’s all the surface level of what he’s presenting to her. But the subtext of all of this just radiates. Chiefly, the implications that Calum is gay. You can see these little moments like the brief conversations with a diving instructor, and there’s a moment in the “club” dream interstitials where it almost looks like he’s kissing a man. There’s the moment where she sees two men kissing on vacation as Calum walks into the sea. There’s the way the film seemingly draws a parallel to her own queer identity and the way she thinks about him at this time. But most of all, there’s a kind of implication when he says the line, “you can love whoever you want to love, be whoever you want to be, you have time.” And you realize there’s this unspoken implication that he doesn’t have time.

Which gives way to some conjecture that Calum is not just gay, but perhaps given the implied 90s setting, might have AIDS and knows he is dying. That his wording and clearly haunted expression is an implication of how little time he has. And the way he clearly seems to be gone from her life in the modern setting. But the whole point is we can’t say any of this for certain. And personally speaking, for me, the movie feels more like the haunting portrait of depression and suicidal feelings, and so his not feeling long for the world takes on a different tenor. But his behavior - along with the tai chi and meditation books apply to both possibilities. And even if it is a stealth story about AIDS, it’s real power lies in the fact that it didn’t say it. Because if it becomes a movie about that? Then the entire movie is about that. Such is the power of that topic. But the whole point is that we are grounded in Sophie’s perspective, the things she does not know, along with the things she’s piecing together for the first time.

At one point she asks, “when you were 11 what did you think you’d be doing now?”

The innocent question leads to a story he doesn’t want recorded. Because it turns out nobody remembered his 11th birthday. And when he said so to his parents, his mother met him with anger and grabbed him by the ear, then made his dad go to the store to buy him something (which turned out to be a little phone toy, which is so gutting. For it is likely inexpensive and yet a wish to reach out and connect, fuck I keep crying as I write this essay). You see Sophie process this story. For it is part of the realization that her father had a much different life than she did. That it was likely abusive and he was ignored. And that he is trying so hard for her to be the opposite, but still clearly pained from his past. And it’s still locked inside him. He wrestles with that so clearly. Something so deeply indicated in the juxtaposition of her “for he’s a jolly good fellow” birthday wishing and how it goes back to him absolutely bawling to himself, naked, and alone the night prior. It’s the painful thing he feels inside. This juxtaposition is what he lives in. And for her, the juxtaposition of not fully understanding it haunts her now.

Which brings it to the title.

There’s a point in the film where they innocently talk about being in the sun and having that time for now and they don’t really draw too much of a fine line on it. But the film’s title implies how much this film is really about what we’re left with afterward. Which makes sense given how much of the movie itself is a memory. A vacation with a father and all the things it implies about his life beyond hers.. Of course, it’s easy for us to project that it is incredibly specific to Charlotte Wells’s own life, and heck, she’s said as much, but the remarkable nature of her first features is that she has made that personal experience of hers feel so universal. For this is the power of the unsaid. We can project what we can project. But all we get is a little, personal window with which to do so.

Because in the end, we are still so grounded in Sophie’s shoes. As she sits and watches the playback before the camera drifts to that final, haunting shot of her father finishing recording and disappearing back into the strobing club room, we are hit with the metaphor because we understand how much this movie is about the parts of our family that still sit behind barriers. It’s the things she didn’t know about a person who loved her so, so deeply - but who also needed to disappear into the mania of a dance for some host of reasons she could not fathom at the tender age of eleven. And that he was a person who was afraid to be seen, and now perhaps is gone from her. And all she has is her memories, along with that tape recording to stare at - as it stares back at her, still. All she has is the image on the screen. For these artifacts of our own history. The things we carry around because they somehow are unexplainable in their deepest of meanings. Like a rug that her father couldn’t afford, but bought anyway, and why it is still in her room to this day.

Because some things leave us, but never leave us.

<3HULK