As author C.S. Lewis wrote in A Grief Observed (1961): “In grief nothing ‘stays put’.” For Lewis, grief is not a linear process, but recurrent, cyclical and never truly complete. “Everything repeats,” he writes. “Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral? But if a spiral, am I going up or down it?”
Lewis’s metaphor is an apt description for director and writer Charlotte Wells’ award-winning film Aftersun (2022). About returning from and returning to our past, Aftersun is a product of memory and an unfolding act of remembrance. The film’s events happen in the past tense, but as critic Daniel Drake observed in The New York Review of Books, it also captures what it is to be stuck in an imperfect present.
