Charlotte Wells makes a rather amazing feature debut in the Critics Week sidebar of Cannes with Aftersun, starring Paul Mescal and nine-year-old newcomer Francesca Corio, about a divorced dad and his young daughter taking a low-key summer holiday in a budget Turkish resort, a sunshine break that is a kind of farewell.
Wells’s movie ripples and shimmers like a swimming pool of mystery; the way Wells captures mood and moment, never labouring the point or forcing the pace, reminded me of the young Lucrecia Martel. With remarkable confidence, she just lets her movie unspool naturally, like a haunting and deceptively simple short story. The details accumulate; the images reverberate; the unshowy gentleness of the central relationship inexorably deepens in importance.
