A Tale of Two Viewings: AFTERSUN (2022)
A two-part review chronicle of how Charlotte Wells' masterfully devastating debut broke me down into a blubbering wreck.
February 1st, 2023:
“I think it's nice that we share the same sky.”
In the aftermath of Aftersun, I need some time to process what I’ve just seen.
In many ways, it put me in mind of what it was like to watch The Blackcoat’s Daughter the first time, where it feels all throughout that you’re only being presented with half the story, and that there’s another important, horrible side to it that’s happening in plain sight, but you’re never quite sure exactly what it is, only that there’s a steadily building undercurrent of dread roiling beneath the placid surface, a persistent nagging sadness and desolation tugging at all we can see.
There’s a lot more I feel I could say about Aftersun, but with merely a single viewing, it feels incomplete. Partially (and definitely) by design of the way Charlotte Wells expertly tells the story, but also because my emotional response to the film feels like it’s telling me I need to go back, and view anew all that I saw through a different lens.
Considering the story’s melancholy kaleidoscope of memory, reflections, abstractions, cameras, videos, photographs, and lenses upon lenses refracting recollection and truth into a dreamlike sensory cacophony, this seems rather appropriate.
Until then, I’ll just say that I hope Paul Mescal is happy (not in a snarky way, but in a genuine wish for his positive wellbeing after seeing the depths of the sadness in his performances in this, and Normal People); that I think Frankie Corio is incredible, plus also kind of looks like Halloween 4 and 5-era Danielle Harris if she was a wee Scottish lass; and that that scene with the Queen needle drop is going to haunt my mind and hurt my heart for a long, long time…
March 11th, 2023:
"You can live wherever you want to live. Be whoever you want to be. You have time."
The first time I watched Aftersun was on MUBI, at home, on my TV. As I discovered, it’s the kind of film for which a second viewing is almost a requirement to fully absorb and process everything that had been going on beneath the deceptively placid surface. It puts you, as a viewer, in the same position as the adult Sophie within the film: needing to go back and replay everything you witnessed before, only now through the prism of observing every fleeting moment with an investigative scrutiny, searching for the warning signs you may have missed, amplifying the agony of the signs you'd already caught.
(This thought put me in mind of the film's comparability to the game Her Story, where you play as an initially anonymous person combing through old digitised VHS tapes, piecing together a dark narrative from disjointed parts presented by an unreliable narrator, where memory and imagination are impossible to disentangle, and any truth to be found is illusory and ambiguous, save for the fact that someone died, and the trauma from that death lingers on. Thematically similar as the film and the game are in this way, Her Story also shares the visual motif of the person in the present having their ghostly reflection dimly cast upon the screen through which they're watching the tapes of the past.)
This second time of watching Aftersun, now all-encompassingly projected on a cinema's big screen, and now knowing what to expect, yet dreading the inevitable gut-punch of the ending?
The film broke me.
It hit me with the emotional force of a bullet to the chest.
Once the scene happened - the one with the devastating needle drop, mixed with Oliver Coates' mournful cello score, that together collude to rip your goddamn heart out - I was reduced to a weeping, winded wreck.
Whenever tears fill my eyes, it hurts, stinging like needles to my corneas, so I could barely even keep my eyes open during the final moments, whilst at the same time every new shaky breath threatened to break out into a sob. And that’s the state I was in throughout the last 10 minutes, including the end credits… and then for another 10 minutes after that, continuing on through to when I’d left the screening, and I was still having to wipe my eyes, and clean my glasses from the teardrops that had spattered and dried on the lenses.
I don’t know what the other audience members thought of me, if they even saw or heard my sniffling from beneath my mask, nor me discretely dabbing my eyes with tissues as the heartbreaking profundity of the film's ending kept washing over me in ebbing waves.
But whatever. All that matters is that this film is a quiet triumph of cinematic artistry, delicacy, and subtlety, its startling effectiveness borne from just how subdued, minimalist, un-melodramatic, and emotionally truthful Charlotte Wells keeps the story to its core, and how Paul Mescal and Frankie Corio's sublimely naturalistic performances reflect that dedication.
There’s a lot within Aftersun that whenever it feels personally relatable, it's as if it peers into your very soul, and with heat-seeking precision finds a soft spot of inner vulnerability to reflect up on the screen. Be it the lush 35mm film cinematography from Gregory Oke that basks the late-90's setting in the kind of nostalgic grainy textural warmth of disposable camera snapshots of holidays long past, or the story's capturing of the period of childhood when one feels a yearning to be grown up enough to grasp and experience whatever exciting things older kids get up to past the point of puberty, or be it simply what it's like to have a parent whose words and deeds you can't begin to understand until you reach the age they were when they had you, and their status as solely your parent evolves to encompass who they were as just another person trying to live in this world the same as you... Aftersun has a way of getting to you.
I could write about the film for hours, if not days, because I am of the opinion that Aftersun is a breathtaking masterpiece, and Charlotte Wells is an extraordinarily gifted filmmaker for producing a work this assured and phenomenal.
So I'll forego the never-ending-review option by instead signing this off with an observation that struck me with awful clarity during this rewatch, with regards to Callum's behaviours and reactions towards the presence of the camera, and how they were informed by the unspoken spectre of depression visibly weighing him down.
The following is what I jotted down in my phone on the bus ride home, in a flurry of stream-of-consciousness writing attempting to recapture the succession of thoughts I'd earlier had:
"What is it that compels Callum to both hate being filmed, yet repeatedly return to rewatching the footage shot by him and Sophie? It’s the horror of being perceived by the camera’s cruelly objective lens; of being able to see outside yourself, see how others see you, and see that your façade of well-being isn’t convincing enough for you to believe in it, so you feel like it isn’t working for others either, so you feel like you failed to do the thing you put so much of your energy into: putting on a mask that sells the lie that you’re okay. Callum hates the camera for peering into the sadness into his eyes, and recording it onto a permanent format that can be replayed again and again at will, yet he’s obsessed with reviewing the footage of him and Sophie, because he can’t help but punish himself by watching and rewatching how he’s perceived by Sophie, and how much he feels he’s failed to live up to her unquestioning adoration for him, her father; yet he also wants to rewind and rewatch her happiness and joy to vicariously try to feel it through her eyes, no matter how unattainable it feels for him."