User reviews

I have two daughters and recently got divorced. I know how it hurts to put on a fake smile while deep inside your heart is bleeding. As a father, a man, you try to look strong and resilient, to keep your children worry-free, but every time the girls are not around you feel like an empty shell. This movie made me cry because I know how it feels to be Callum. I know how hard it is to leave your precious children behind and to be torn away from your family. Leaving behind beautiful memories and slowly drifting apart from your loved ones. It's very hard to move on and I hope to experience better days in the future.

Aftersun is a film that I wasn't sure I understood when the credits started rolling. Then, as I sat and thought about everything I had seen, I came to believe more and more that it's kind of genius.

What the movie lacks in overt substantive plot it more than makes up for in authenticity and subtle placement of character-building images and dialogue. In the moment, these often feel like tangents and the overall picture isn't clear.

While it can make for a frustrating first viewing, the clarity that comes with the film's final shot suddenly puts everything into perspective and I felt an overwhelming flood of emotion for the two central characters.

Suffering happen more often than not in silence, and it's the cumulative of this film's many quiet moments that drive home one of the most effective, nuanced messages of compassion that I've seen all year.

This is a masterpiece of subtlety, arguably slightly to a fault, but it's refreshing to see it in the age of "hammer over the head" messaging in movies that we're currently living in.

I am only writing this review so I can remember later on why I only gave this movie a 6. I understand that this movie has an extremely powerful and intimate presentation of the relationship between a reckless father and his young daughter. I noticed the intricacies and nuance that the film makers tried to convey throughout. I just did not connect with the film at all. I imagine that this film hit some people hard but for me I was quite bored with it by the end. I have to simply be true to my own feelings and opinions from a film and conclude that to me, it is simply ok. Don't take my rating too seriously because I can genuinely imagine somebody else watching this film thinking that it is the best thing they ever saw.

This film crept up on me. I was worried it was a gimmicky art film (plus at the beginning the dialogue was hard to decipher) but as the film went on I was swept up in it - purely down to Paul Mescal's and Francesca Corio's performances. Achingly beautiful. I was crying without realising and also on the tube home - the tears just kept coming but it was nothing to do with me.

Alison Willmore from Vulture at New York Magazine perfectly articulated what I felt :' It's about wanting to reach across time, and to meet a loved one in an impossible space where, for once, you're both on the same level, and you can finally understand them for who they are - or who they were.'

It's one thing for a movie to be subtle and nuanced, but it's something else entirely to be enigmatic and cryptic. And, regrettably, the debut feature from writer-director Charlotte Wells delivers more of the latter than the former. This melancholic character study tells the story of a woman (Celia Rowlson-Hall) who looks back 20 years to a vacation that her perky 11-year-old self (Frankie Corio) took with her young and loving but quietly troubled father (Paul Mescal). In doing so, it explores the subjects of memory, parent-child relationships, mental and emotional well-being, and the various senses of loss we all experience over time, topics that the protagonist's youthful counterpart may not have fully understood at the time but that her adult self now does. I wish I could say the same for myself, though; I often felt that I was being tasked to construct a narrative for the picture myself, based, essentially, on merely what was being shown to me, material that frequently comes across as underdeveloped and open to an array of interpretation in terms of both story line and character development. To put it simply, I didn't feel I was given enough substance to work with to accomplish that task, and it often left me feeling wanting, abandoned by the filmmaker, and, ultimately, uninterested. And, to complicate matters further, the film's poor sound quality regularly obscures the characters' dialogue behind their thick Scottish accents, and its often-dark, overly muddled cinematography made some images difficult to decipher at times. What's more, this offering's camera work - aimed at simulating glorified home movies, a fitting approach for telling this story - is packed with innocuous material. Indeed, who really cares about sitting through endless footage of the characters engaging in mundane activities like playing video games, eating ice cream and attempting to sing karaoke? The "looking back in fondness" factor in these supposedly touching segments is a little too inane to engender truly heart-tugging feelings, constituting cinematic padding more than anything integral or meaningful to the overall story. Considering all of the advance glowing reactions I had read about this release, I was really looking forward to it going in. Unfortunately, though, I came away from it almost as sad and disappointed as the protagonist herself.

I almost never watch films twice but 'Aftersun' was a rare case where I absolutely had to. I don't think this film can be fully appreciated on first watch. I saw someone suggest that after you watch it your mind will go back to little moments and re-evaluate their significance, and it will. But watching it again with the full picture gives the entire movie a different perspective. The second watch is almost like watching a different film.

Kids in films, particularly in lead roles, can often be very annoying. That isn't an issue here. Frankie Corio gives one of the most likeable child performances I can ever remember seeing. Her chemistry with Paul Mescal was amazing. I read that she wasn't privy to Mescal's solo scene rehearsals, so that she wasn't fully aware of what his character was going through, much the same as her character Sophie wasn't. That's brilliant.

Something that was very apparent on second viewing was the significance of the music in the movie. The first time through I remember thinking, "there are a lot of good songs in this movie". On second viewing you realise that every song used is telling a story. It's telling you what is going on, but like most people in the real world, we just hear a banging song and nod our head to it. Then later on we reconsider its true meaning.

Finally, this film has one of the beast movie endings I can remember seeing. It's classy, heavy and thoughtful all at once. It's done in a beautiful and somewhat haunting way that will stick with me for a long time. 9.5/10.

A teenage girl (Sophie) and her father (Calum) journey to a seaside resort in Turkey for a brief but momentous vacation. Since her parents are separated and she lives with her mother, Sophie rarely gets such an opportunity to spend time with her dad. As they swim and snorkel together, share meals and a room, and talk about important things in life, the two begin to truly bond. Happy and cherished memories are formed, yet problems such as depression, alcoholism, and doubt surface as well. Sophie and Calum attempt to ride the waves that lift them up but just as easily take them under.

Aftersun is an intimate and moving portrait of a father and daughter relationship that, according to the director who was at this Toronto International Film Festival screening, is loosely based on real people and her own life. The camera work is intentionally unsteady and from the point of view of Sophie. The filming technique is meant to evoke the sensation of Sophie looking back on treasured memories as if they were in a picture show. There are occasional jumps forward in time of adult Sophie reflecting on what these memories mean to her. The personalities of the characters are gradually revealed so the audience has a chance to meditate on who they are.

Aftersun is the feature debut for Charlotte Wells. It is deeply personal for her. It first appeared in Cannes. There is a tremendously moving dance sequence that alone is worth watching the entire film. While the mechanics of Aftersun (the acting, images, story construction, etc.) are more than sound, it really rises above the ordinary and is so stirring because of its central themes; how we shape the memories that we hold and the important things we wish to say to those we love but often don't get a chance to say. "Live wherever you want and be whoever you want," Calum tells Sophie. "You can talk to me about anything."

Critics who have seen this film at festivals, where the director can reveal details in person about the film and answer questions to clear up misconceptions, can then write their reviews based on information the average viewer does not have. These critics then read other critics' reviews and, not wanting to be seen as churlish or unkind, tend to accentuate the same positive elements and downplay the elements that don't work or are under-developed in a film. This is why some films as mediocre as, say, Cameraperson or Moonlight or Petite Maman, end up on so many 10-best lists. I believe this is what has happened with Aftersun. It is gentle, well-imagined, filmed and edited with invention, and performed with naturalistic touches, but it is also underwhelming, content to suggest portentous events but unwilling to create even a hint of drama surrounding them. I had many questions about the characters and their back stories, and I don't believe that providing just a few answers would have hurt the movie's mood. In fact, they would have enhanced it. Aftersun is a lovely debut for the director, but it is also flawed in many ways, the flaws illustrative of many first-time films that in an effort to avoid being too obvious end up being too reticent.

You have a video of a holiday in the past, when you were young, before life's burdens had amassed, with a father you adore, likes to take to the dancefloor, though he's generally withdrawn and quite downcast. A reflection of a time when eyes were new, interpretation was a seed, as yet to grow, but when you look back now, it's a different world somehow, revealing spaces not yet entered, or sought to go.

It's a slow meander, beautifully filmed, with two incredible performances, although those two highlights alone don't create a piece that takes your breath away as much as you might like, until you sit down to reflect, and absorb what you've seen through your own eyes.

After watching this beautiful film and coming across a little note from the amazing storyteller Charlotte Wells:

(I cannot share URL apparently so please search "A note from Charlotte Wells from the site of A24.")

This was the word that broke me down. Hasret.

I just couldn't resist my tears. As a Turkish person, its just both amazing and heartbreaking from the point of view of the director that this word resonates with her feelings from a place she had this holiday with her late father. That it stuck with her...

Even though it is not the same case at all, I remember the times as a kid I closed the door on my dad because he would come home late from work. That because he would promise me to come home early.

Now, today I can't even imagine how saddening it was for him at those times and it wasn't even at his hands.

Hopefully I will be able to share my love and gratitude my parents as Charlotte did here with such elegance through some way. Since, it's not easy to recapture feeling this instant or in any...

Thank you for this film all in all, it surely made me reconsider a lot recently...

This quietly devastating drama is the sort of thing that only gets more powerful the longer you think about it, finding most of its success thanks to its intangibly tangible afterburn. Much like the gentle afternoon sun itself, the piece's power goes mostly unnoticed until you realise, long after you've removed yourself from its glare, that it has left an indelible mark with a noticeable need to be soothed. Although its title would imply that it also acts as the balm to settle such a sore, 'Aftersun (2022)' doesn't actually do much in the way of easing the melancholy it itself provokes. It's a really, really sad movie that only gets more sad the more you turn it over in your mind. Telling its seemingly simple story of a father and daughter's time abroad using a mixture of memories and videotape, the flick plays around with linearity to such an extent that its events can take on an entirely new meaning - or, at least, its ambiguities can be partially answered - if you take the time to consider the implications of its potentially 'true' chronology. The narrative is incredibly slow and it only deals with traditional conflict as it approaches its final third, but ultimately it's exactly what it needs to be in order to have the effect it does. It's odd that the in-the-moment experience is markedly worse than its lingering aftermath, not just because it's the in-the-moment experience that directly causes said aftermath but also because it risks alienating its audience. The ambiguous affair never feeds you the answers, only ever alluding to what it's actually about, and this does mean you have to be willing to put in the work to allow it to do its magic. It's a bold choice, but I feel it pays off in the end. Besides which, even if you don't quite know why, the film certainly leaves you feeling melancholic. That it stays with you despite - or, perhaps, because of - its unwillingness to make itself an easier watch is especially impressive. Though I can't deny I was somewhat bored during the first half, I also can't deny that the movie has continued to have an effect in the days since I watched it. As such, one has to wonder if it was ever really boring at all. In either case, this is an undeniably fantastic slice of filmmaking. The cinematography, shot composition and blocking are often incredibly unique, at once conveying the fuzziness of memory and the blissful mundanity of a relaxing holiday. The performances and direction combine to create a realistic experience that feels pseudo-documentarian at times, which ultimately makes the narrative's implied epilogue all the more sorrowful. In the end, this is a distinct and affecting picture that deals principally in ambiguities and doesn't do any work on the part of the audience but is all the more rewarding for it. It's a hard one to quantify, in a way, because its in-the-moment experience contrasts fairly heavily with its overall, principally reflexive effect.

A moving film about a girl reminiscing on a holiday to Turkey taken with her estranged father 20 years prior. The use of music is terrific, the two central performances are very touchingly delivered (Paul Mescal and the young Frankie Corio). It is one of the films of 2022. The fact this is Charlotte Wells' debut feature is nothing more than astonishing. She delivers massive assurance and confidence in direction, which pushes the narrative forward very tenderly as the girl (Sophie) tries to reconcile her relationship with her father Callum in two separate timelines.

Along the way we are given snippets of her father's troubles. Wells' very cleverly weaves in a subtext that works to a crescendo in the last 10 minutes which includes one of the most brilliant transition shots in recent cinema (not hyperbole, it really is brilliant). The viewer is invited to join the dots on what has happened between the two timelines and there are several clues that help.

Wells' debut has a familiarity with the work of fellow Scottish director Lynne Ramsay, and in particular her film 'Morvern Callar'. This feels lie the birth of another great director.

I cant love more Paul Mescal and his realism in front of the camera, is just a dude doing real things and not and like and actor doing an script, but for me, the movie is incredibly overhyped..

Of course the boring slow moments adds some "truth" into the film but when the slow moving silent shots are 50% of the movie, you finish thinking is the film deserves the full paid ticket or you need the half price refunded.

To be honest, I can watch filmed vacations with Paul 24h daily like a big brother program, but it is not the point..

I understand the movie wants to be subtle and open to leave some in feelings in you to finish the work of create a story, but it was too much blank spaces.. just too much.

Ok, I get it that this is a wannabe cult movie. But the shaking camera (epileptics beware), the exceeding long scenes with nothing (like the first one when the father dances at the balcony with his back to the camera), and the people's faces out of frame (sometimes only part of the face is on screen) are too much even for a cult movie.

The movie has no message so they overused these techniques to cover the lack of substance.

If you dont sleep earlier, you will go through the movie trying to find clues to discover what is the intended message. Reaching the end and not finding any, you will either justify your loss of time by praising this movie as "original" or you will realize the farce. I am among the second group of people.

The one thing you can say about the film Aftersun is that it's not afraid of subtlety. It's human realism at its core dealing with themes such as childhood, fatherhood, responsibility, class, and vulnerability. It's the opposite of dramatic yet it keeps you engaged and glued to the screen through out as you care about the characters despite the simplicity of their day to day interactions. Paul Mescal plays Callum, a young father to an 11 year-old somewhat precocious girl named Sophie. The film in my opinion is about a father who tries his best to maintain a rock like mask to convey strength and stability for his daughter while being emotionally vulnerable underneath. Occasionally throughout the film that mask slips a little bit as Callum struggles to bear the responsibility of being a dad at such a young age and while facing his own personal troubles. At the same time his daughter, getting older and wiser, starts to explore the world of adolescence while on holiday where she also begins to notice her father's vulnerabilities. It's a sensitive film and one that leaves you enthralled and attached to the characters on a deeply human level even if that dramatic colonel doesn't pop the way you might except.

This film paints a picture of a tortured soul with the most delicate brush strokes. Following father and daughter on a holiday abroad, this is a beautiful observation of a childhood holiday. At the same time, it's a masterful study of a man's daily struggle with his mental health.

I read from the reviews that there are very divided opinions. Perhaps if you've never struggled with depression you will just see a slow paced movie about a dad and his daughter on holiday. But if you have, you might see this as one of the best films about depression that you're seen for ages.

For a film about depression I found it strangely uplifting. I can think of no reason for that other than it's because it is so bloody good.