Aftersun (2022)

Aftersun is Charlotte Wells's achingly tender debut feature, a film that captures a holiday between a young father and his eleven-year-old daughter through the uncertain light of memory and grief. Sophie (Frankie Corio) and her father Calum (Paul Mescal) spend a vacation at a modest Turkish resort, and the film unspools through fragments — video footage Sophie shot on a camcorder, recalled images, half-heard conversations — as an adult Sophie tries to reconstruct what she did not understand as a child.

What makes Aftersun so quietly devastating is what it withholds. Wells refuses easy explanations, allowing meaning to accumulate through texture: the way Calum holds himself when he thinks no one is watching, the tenderness with which he films his daughter, the unbridgeable gap between a parent's inner life and a child's perception of it. Paul Mescal delivers a performance of extraordinary restraint, communicating depths of sadness through gesture and avoidance rather than declaration.

The film works in the tradition of quiet, personal cinema — closer to poetry than plot — and belongs alongside such introspective works as Mike Mills's 20th Century Women and Kelly Reichardt's Certain Women. Released to a rapturous critical reception, Aftersun earned Paul Mescal an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor and established Charlotte Wells as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary world cinema.