A Cannes award winner for Edinburgh, Scotland-born writer-director Charlotte Wells, “Aftersun” is the story of a young woman remembering a trip she took as a preteen with her troubled, but loving father. When the film begins, we see some video images captured on a late 1980s-early 1990s digital camera. The girl is Sophie (Frankie Corio). Her father, whose wrist is in a cast, is Calum (Paul Mescal of “God’s Creatures”), who signs off on a phone call with Sophie’s mum with the words, “Love you,” even though they are no longer together.
Sophie asks her dad about about this. It’s awkward. The 30-year-old father and daughter, who are mistaken as siblings, are on a bus trip to a sunny Turkish Mediterranean resort. They stay at a seaside hotel that has a pool and dances after dinner and other families.
The switch from Sophie filming with the camera to a movie camera filming them is a bit awkward, calling attention to the artifice. Calum, who is based in London, sometimes calls Glasgow resident Sophie “Puppet.” She navigates the entertainment the hotel offers to children her age. What she finds is a young man more or less her age with whom she plays a real (and obviously metaphorical) motorbike race arcade game, zoom-zoom. How eager children are at this age are to grow up, we are reminded. Sophie also finds herself allowed entry into group of older kids in part because she can play pool. Her father, who spends a lot of time on his own, teaches her how to break a hold on her wrists, if she needs to, a form of self-defense. Sophie overhears one of the older girls talk nonchalantly about a noncoital sexual encounter she had with a boy behind a bush.
