Aftersun Review (Archive)

0:00Wednesdays are when we like to drop something from the FilmSpotting archive, that massive archive that's always available to members of the FilmSpotting family. Adam, we're going to share a little bit of something from that here. Now, on Friday's show, we're going to announce the winner of the 2025 Golden Brick Award, our favorite film from a new or emerging director. Today, we have our review of the 2022 winner, a movie, Adam, that was our shared number one film of the year, Charlotte Wells' Afterson. How about that? That hasn't happened too often in the history of the show where we have a joint number one.

0:39I feel like maybe Ex Machina and then I wasn't officially part of the show yet, but The Tree of Life? Are those the only other two? I think I had Ex Machina at number two. Okay. So After Sun and Tree of Life, maybe Lovers Rock as well, 2020? That could be right. Yep. I think that's it. So rare company here for After Sun. We do adore this film. Connections in terms of the golden brick and being our number one. But also, how about Paul Meskel and Hamnet getting so much attention as well this awards season? Just seemed like a perfect opportunity to drop this one back into the feed. So, from November 2022, here is that review of Aftersun.

1:28You know, I want you to know that you can talk to me about anything. Whenever parties you go to, boys you meet, drugs you take. Dad! Oh my God, what even is that? These are my moves. Oh, that's so embarrassing. That's not embarrassing. That's from the trailer for Aftersun, which opens in limited release this weekend. It's the feature debut of Scottish filmmaker Charlotte Wells. The film premiered at Cannes earlier this year and has been playing to much acclaim and too much heartache and some tears on the festival circuit since then. Before I say more, I did want to just quickly note, Josh, that we're not going to spoil anything about this movie.

2:06Anything we talk about are elements that you can find in every plot description of this movie and presumably every review of this movie. You can also find a lot of it in the trailer itself. But if, like me, up until seeing it, you've avoided knowing anything about the film, really just knowing it's father and daughter, and you don't know anything about the conceit of it, the structure, the formal elements, and you want to keep it that way, then I'd say stop listening right now. Skip this, because I really appreciated going into this film the way I did, and we might talk about that a little bit more here in a bit.

2:45The movie is about a young woman's memories of a holiday she took with her troubled father 20 years earlier. The father is played by Paul Meskel, who we saw recently in God's Creatures. The daughter Sophie is played by newcomer Frankie Corio and is a grown-up by Celia Rolson-Hall. Like me, Josh, you probably knew a little bit about the movie's reputation before seeing it. I'm sure we both noticed some of the people we follow on Letterboxd logging it and praising it, giving it high star ratings. A lot of fellow critics who caught up with it at various festivals were having some pretty intense emotional responses to it.

3:21Did the movie surprise you in the way it handled its emotional material? Boy, this film left me stunned. And I knew that because I try to stay through the end credits of most movies I go to just to, you know, let that time for things to percolate, take a break, take a breath, you know, see what I can pick up from the credits. If I have time, I like to do that. I stayed through the credits of After Sun because I couldn't move. It was speaking to your question about the emotions. I don't think it was till that point that I realized how moving the film had been, how deceptively overwhelming it was.

4:08I felt some of that while watching it, but I never felt the full force of it. Some of this has to do with the final shot, which we will not talk about the final scene, really. Certainly that is part of the reason, but I think it was again, the stealthy way Wells has constructed this story. She's constructed it almost in the same manner. And it's too precise for this to be the case, but it feels like it's been constructed in the same manner that the main character is experiencing her memories. It's all of a piece. That's the trick. That's the trick. And I think that's why it hit me that way is there's this growing sense of, you know, the emotions at play, the dynamics at play, the ones I could relate to in some ways, the ones I couldn't, but could appreciate from afar.

5:00And I was invested in the way you are with most well-made intimate familial dramas. But yeah, this sense of just being overwhelmed by it that didn't hit me to the end, it's not just a matter of having a great final scene. It's a matter of how the thing was made from frame one. Frame one. This could have the best opening scene of the year that is interesting the first time you're watching it. And there are details I noticed that I thought, remember that. I wonder if that's going to, that choice, that particular little visual choice is going to come back into play. And then the movie goes on and you're like, oh, yeah, everything about that first shot was intentional in a way that is crucial to how this film works.

5:46So this is this is a stunner. Yeah, I'm with you. I tweeted after seeing it that it can't be a first feature. Right. Because of how sophisticated and mature it is visually and also emotionally, like you said, really from the first moment in the first frame. And I like your choice of words, deceptively overwhelming, stealthy. Yes, it really does sneak up on you. It's a film that washes over you the more you sit with it, but especially as it accumulates and it builds to that final scene that you mentioned. But I say it feels like it shouldn't be or can't be a first feature. And yet it also feels to me like a first feature in one particular way.

6:32And I regret that I'm going to say all this and I can't share the exact wording or all of the details. If someone out there knows what I'm referencing and can point me in the right direction, please do because I've forgotten it. But I know it's one of my or I'm pretty sure, Josh, it's one of my two favorite writers, either Paul Auster or John Irving wrote something at some point that has always lingered with me about why debut novels are usually so good. and sometimes the writer's best. And I think this can apply to albums and a lot of art. And I do want to throw out the disclaimer that I don't want to suggest here that there aren't many great films in Wells' future.

7:12But the debuts are so potent because the artist has been working towards telling this story their entire lives. The next thing they do is the buildup and accumulation of a couple years maybe in their lives, even if it perhaps taps into some things from their past and their personal life. But I have seen a few things here and there, and my sense is that Charlotte Wells has been mysterious about exactly how personal the story and events are, which I think is great. But you can very easily see that older Sophie in this movie trying to come to terms with her relationship with and feelings for her father through examining her memories in this footage.

7:55You can see that as a stand-in for her and the filmmaking process that resulted in this movie. You can see young Sophie then as a stand-in for her as a young girl. And at the risk of playing armchair psychiatrist any further, what is more important to understanding your own identity than reckoning with everything that this character is trying to reconcile here? Surely she's been wrestling with this, if not down to every specific detail. but the broad strokes of it, her whole life. And she's managed to manifest it here in such a beautiful and heartbreaking way. Yeah. And that personal intimacy that is brought to the story is crucial and a key part to why the film is so good.

8:47But it's also something that a lot of first-time filmmakers will bring to their material, which is understandable. One of the other things about Aftersun that makes it distinct from those, I think is, as we've hinted at, the ways she goes about it. So I want to talk a little bit about the different viewpoints we get in this movie. Very early on, we do understand that Sophie as an adult is largely telling this or experiencing this, I should say. And we see her scouring video footage from this trip when she was younger, when she was 11, trying to fully understand what happened in these couple of days.

9:23But then Wells and the editor here, Blair McClendon, they weave very incisively those home movie snippets we see with these straightforward third-person scenes of their time in Turkey together. So this could just be, you know, like any other drama we're watching. We have that distance removed. We're there with them, but it's not always from one of the character's points of view. Yet, we also get these other scenes that very much are from young Sophie's point of view. And I love the touch in so many of those where the camera drifts a little bit away from the father's face. And it just gives us that sense again of we don't fully have a handle and she doesn't either of this memory or who her father was in that moment because the camera is actually doing that drifting away.

10:11And then on top of these elements, we get these very jarring flashes to the adult Sophie on this strobe lit dance floor. And that returns to the film's ending that I mentioned in a shattering way. But the decision to tell this story, to share these memories, I want to stop saying tell this story because there's something more distinct happening here. The decision to share these memories from all these different vantage points is crucial. And then the skill, again, with the editor here, Blair McClendon, to know just when to shift from one to the other is, for me, what makes this so masterful. Yeah, I think the use of the word drifts there is really important because the way she renders movement is something that really stuck with me about this film.

11:01The attention to arms, to hands, to feet, to birds in the sky, to parasailers, to the footage itself that we sometimes see rewinding. We see a Polaroid photo of father and daughter begin to develop but never come fully into focus. A powerful visual metaphor for Wells' exploration of identity and a relationship that is just in the process of forming. It never gets to finish. Everything here, even if it's not kinetically so, the camera isn't wildly moving, but everything is in motion. She captures the fractured fleetingness of memory, how hard it is to reconcile something that is this complex and is unfinished.

11:47And and not just how it works, not just how that process of reconciliation and memory works, but how it feels. The movie, the movie gets it how it feels. We experience it along with these characters, really. I think we have to say these these multiple characters. And I don't know what the right word to use is either. I want to warn people a little bit or or help them come to this film. We're talking about heartbreaking and how heavy the movie is. But as we both said, it's devastating in a subtle way, in a profound way, but in a subtle way. This isn't Grave of the Fireflies. This isn't a movie that's trying to punch you in the stomach and leave you at the end feeling crushed and hopeless.

12:29It's not. But but that doesn't mean it doesn't still hit you in a really emotional way. Well, to go back to that image you mentioned of the Polaroid, which is a great one to call out, that's lightly held. I mean, when we describe it, it can sound maybe heavy and too symbolic, too metaphorical, but it's not. In the moment, in the scene, how it happens, it's very lightly held. And I'll call out another visual detail that I think for me works the same way because it's a moment that's conveying a lot of different information, some of which I won't talk about. But there's a shot of the father walking towards the beach at night.

13:09And it's almost surreal. We're not quite sure what we're looking at because the screen is so dark. But the back of Mescal's head, his skin is incredibly fair. And so in the darkness of night, all we see is this stretch of the back of his neck between his hair and the shirt he's wearing that almost glows in the dark. And you can see how this is working in the same way that Polaroid does, right? It's giving us a sense of here's this man she was trying to understand then. She's trying to understand now as an adult. And all she gets is a little sliver, a little illuminated sliver on the screen of the larger mystery at play here.

13:51And there it's almost like every other shot has that sort of loaded potency to it, but also without bearing it and holding it too heavily or pushing it too hard. There's a lightness to all of this. And I'm glad you said that there are very serious things happening here, but there is also a lot of lightness in the performances. I want to talk about the performances a little bit and this, the repartee between father and son here, because I love how they, they tease each other in ways they're clearly enjoying each other's company. Enjoying this time to just have together. You get the sense that Sophie is mostly with her mother.

14:29And so this is a special time for them to have just together. And, you know, Mescal, who is, is really good in God's creatures. He's got a difficult task here to shift among these various roles as this guy, right? He has to be the caregiver. He's in charge, but he's a friend kind of it. It's I get the sense that your father, but also friend, if you know, you don't see your child on a daily basis, you're a mentor. You can be a mentor. But then this goes back to what you're saying in our top five there. You're also a rule enforcer and you can't just be a rule enforcer when you feel like it. That's got to be part of your identity.

15:05So I do think Mescal manages to, even though he's playing a person who is purposefully supposed to be at a remove, we get a sense of him wrestling with all of those roles. And then choreo, you need an unconsciousness in a child performance. And she has that. But this kid in particular, for where she is at life, that crucial stage around 11, where you're, the way I put it when I wrote about the movie is that you might not want to hold your parents' hand anymore. You just make that decision. She also needs a self-awareness. And that's crucial to this role. I think Corio, even as a novice, has that.

15:43And again, just so many fun scenes of them together, sparring with each other, teasing each other, caring for each other in ways that gain importance as the movie proceeds. Yeah. I'll talk about one of those moments, though I am going to say I'm going to save my favorite Meskel moment in the film, what I think is his best acting moment in the film. And there are many to choose from, because I'm pretty sure we're going to talk about him in this movie more as we get through the end of the year. But we go back to our top five list and I was talking about Say Anything. I don't know that Charlotte Wells was actually paying homage to that film or not, but there's a moment we heard it in the clip from the trailer where he says to her, you can tell me about anything, whatever you do, anything you get involved in, you can always tell me that.

16:28And she, of course, thinks he's being a little bit silly because those are things she might want to keep private or things that she's not ready to think about yet or is just starting to at her age think about the movie is very much about that as well just crossing that threshold into adulthood whether you're you're fully ready or not but the difference here the significant difference here between something like say anything and this dynamic between these two is that that line's coming from a father who absolutely means it but because of his depression i think we can say. I think the movie clearly suggests it without explicitly stating it.

17:06He'll never be able to reciprocate that honesty. And what I mean is that what he's feeling and experiencing isn't something he or really anybody can articulate. She actually expresses it in a really powerful, haunting way in the film. And again, this is in the trailer as well, but in a later part of it. Sophie says, as she's just kind of laying on the bed and he asks her what's up or what's she feeling? Oh man. She says, don't you ever feel like you've just done a whole amazing day and then you come home and feel tired and down and feels like your bones don't work. They're just tired and everything is tired.

17:47Like you're sinking. I don't know. It's weird. Yeah. And it's, it's haunting as I said, because of the beat that Wells takes there, the look of recognition on mescal's face it all suggests that she's describing exactly what he often feels and also if she's feeling it josh in that moment the movie doesn't dwell on it but you have to contemplate it as a viewer what if she is inclined towards the same type of depression that he is well that's so yeah right so mescal's processing two troubling thoughts at once but he has to keep up the facade, which is what you have to do as a parent. And all he can say is what he says.

18:27Well, we're here to have a good time. And he tries to change the subject, even though he can't. And can I, since we're talking about that scene in detail, can I, can I just, I'll, I'll mention the thing that just shatters me about it is so she's in on the bed, as you described, he's in the bathroom. So they don't see each other at this point. He's brushing his teeth. And I believe after she finishes saying that his reaction is a pause and he spits the toothpaste at the mirror, essentially at himself. And it's just, it's capturing everything you just said about the questions he's asking himself, the anger he feels about that, the fear he's feeling.

19:03And then, yeah, that, that choice to push it away and, and say, you know, and you can understand that choice. You know, you might want to, the therapist might say, uh, what a teachable moment or something, you know, to have a talk about what you're going through and you might have these feelings too. And here's how, but this isn't a guy in that place, right? He is not in that place. And, um, so his choice he makes, which is completely understandable is to push through and try to find that happiness. And yeah, we've danced a little lightly around this, but I think this is, you know, the major thing that the movie is exploring is alongside her coming of age as an independent person, not a little girl who loves her dad as much in the same way, but in a different way.

19:51This is about a girl who is learning things about adulthood, including her father's struggle to survive it. And that's something that is terrifying, you know, from from her perspective. And I think the movie captures that in incredible ways. Let's just go back real quick to what I touched on in the setup, and I want your thoughts on it. And there's no real point here, I suppose, other than maybe I'm critiquing a little bit the way the movie is being marketed or positioned, which is irrelevant. but every description of this film, as I said, and the trailer tells you what the framing device is, tells you that this is about a person who's reflecting on an experience.

20:36But if you just went into the movie, other than picking up on some things very early on that you really have to be paying attention to, you wouldn't know that. You would be watching a film that is about a father and daughter on vacation and this coming of age story that it is 95 % of the screen time roughly is that. So it wouldn't be inaccurate to just describe this film as something like Sophie and her father learn important things about themselves and life while on vacation together, whatever it is, and just leave it at that. I enjoyed being a little bit confused. I enjoyed being challenged by the strobe light inserts, by the playing back of footage, the replaying of moments, the reflections in TVs, the visual connections the movie makes between Sophie and someone older that the movie hasn't introduced us to yet.

21:29If I've read the plot description, I know what that all signifies, I think. This isn't 2001. It's not Mulholland Drive. I don't want to suggest that Wells doesn't give you really everything you need to process what is playing out. But I loved having to do a little bit of work myself and engage with it that way versus knowing the conceit going in. I'm just bummed out that most people are probably going to walk in knowing all that. Yeah, I think that's its masterstroke is the subtle, artful, you know, it's piercing but never pointed is the way I describe it in exploring the father's troubled inner state.

22:08And you said, you know, for me, I think you're probably right. you know, the vast percentage, whether it's 95 % or whatever is exploring just, you know, this time in this relationship, but that interstate is seeping into every percent. Yes. And that is how, that's what you feel and what makes After Sun distinct. After Sun is currently playing in limited release. If you see it and you really have to and agree or disagree with our takes, You can email us feedback at filmspotting.net. An on-air production meeting question for you, Josh. Sam and I were talking about this a little bit earlier today.

22:48Do we have to? It certainly qualifies in every artistic way. Do we have to consider After Sun as a strong contender for the film spotting Golden Brick? As of right now, as I glance at Box Office Mojo, I think it is expanding to some more screens. It opened in only four theaters. widest release so far is 45 theaters yes 824 is releasing it but again widest release 45 theaters domestic gross right now 338 000 certainly feels like a movie that still very much could despite everything we're saying about it and whatever reach we have still feels like a movie that could very much slide under the radar for people and is worthy of the golden brick yeah let's see let's see how it does.

23:34I mean, I'll be honest. And I have, looking at the list, I have, I think, two films at least on our short list that I really, really like. So it's not like there aren't other strong contenders. For me right now, this would be the runaway winner of the Golden Bricks. So it does come down to how much attention it gets towards the end of the year. If it starts really making waves at the box office and a lot of people are getting a chance to see it, then maybe we think about pulling back from that. I think, as you said, it's going to get a lot of attention on our top 10 show and at our wrap party for all those categories.

24:12But if it's not picking up steam, I want to give it every shout it can get. And if putting it in the golden brick contention where it's a strong candidate to win, we can give it even a little bit more attention. I'm all for that. So let's see what happens with it. I don't know that making, you know, the top 10 lists for a vast number of critics, it's great. It will hit certain audiences. No, that doesn't change anything for me. Right. But I want like I want more than critics to get a chance to appreciate this movie. And that's part of the reason behind The Golden Brick. Yeah, maybe a first time thing here in the history of The Golden Brick.

24:49We're going to put After Sun on the page as a trial, as a trial film, because it certainly is deserving. And we will see how things play out. Maybe if it does, as you said, pick up some steam and more eyeballs get on it, and we feel like it makes more sense to use that award to shine a light on something that is even more obscure, then maybe we'll go in that direction. You can live wherever you want to live. Be whoever you want to be.

25:23you have time

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