Earlier this month, the debut feature from Scottish-born, New York-based writer-director Charlotte Wells picked up a whopping 16 nominations for the British Independent Film awards, an impressive haul second only to Saint Maud’s record-breaking performance in 2020. It’s easy to see why Aftersun has generated such excitement since premiering at Cannes in May. A brilliantly assured and stylistically adventurous work, this beautifully understated yet emotionally riveting coming-of-age drama picks apart themes of love and loss in a manner so dextrous as to seem almost accidental. Don’t be fooled; Wells knows exactly what she’s doing, and her storytelling is as precise as it is piercing.
We meet young, separated father Calum (Normal People’s Paul Mescal) and his 11-year-old daughter, Sophie (screen newcomer Frankie Corio), on holiday together in Turkey in the late 1990s. Sophie is smart for her age (she and Calum are sometimes mistaken for siblings) but she’s still also very much a child, torn between hanging out with the younger kids at the resort or with the more boisterous teenagers who lounge around the pool table. As for Calum, his outward calm seems to cover demons of denial; a trancey energy that threatens to break through the placid surface of his current life, dragging him back into a more chaotic – or euphoric – existence (Moonlight director and Aftersun co-producer Barry Jenkins describes Calum as “wading through wells of quiet anguish”).
