Cannes Review: Paul Mescal plays a troubled father in Charlotte Wells’ delicately stunning debut, ‘Aftersun’ [Grade A-]

What can we do with our fickle memories of childhood, especially the ones painting our parents with idealistic brush strokes, as if they were something more than merely human? Charlotte Wells knows; she makes a film out of them. Aftersun, a feature debut by the Scottish-born, New York-based filmmaker, is a delicately slow burner: a deep emotional drama with all the formal cues of suspenseful thrillers. Such a mix yields ambivalent pleasures: by exploring the possible reconciliation of trauma and happiness, the film envelops the viewer in the sticky-sweet substance of memory for a glorious hour and a half.

Sophie (Frankie Corio) is 11-years old and as a tradition, spends a summer holiday abroad with her early thirties dad (Paul Mescal) just before school starts. Locked in the intensifying orange and blue of the late summer Turkish coastal town, lies a nostalgic reminder that everything ends. Mescal is, here, a troubled, but deeply loving father, whose physical stability in tai-chi practices reveals an ongoing struggle with mental health – his withheld demeanor never crosses the line of clichéd “dad-repression” and his balanced portrayal of a hearty sufferer grounds the story with paradigmatic believability.

Afterlife unfolds slowly, without many perturbations, but its visual style of touching propinquity can only conceal so much – when Sophie starts hanging around older kids who drink, gossip, and kiss, there is a distinctive shift in the film’s atmosphere that singles out small moments as perennially meaningful; ones she will keep etched in her memory forever, we feel. Transmitting the minutiae of memory-formation in an unintrusive, yet imaginative way, is perhaps the strongest singular characteristic that can define Wells’ debut. With a quality so ephemeral but undeniably affective, the filmmaker has put herself on the map as a brilliant discovery.

The relationship between film and memory bookends the film: the opening sequence is a long take of Sophie asking her father about his eleventh birthday, as seen through a camcorder. Later, the film returns to this image, as we see it play out in ‘real’ time, that of the recording. The chase between watching and remembering is embedded in the mere fabric of cinema (and photography), and Aftersun highlights this emotionally potent associative link here quite aptly.

Although, the family archive remembers differently than the actual family members and subtle clues scattered around the film’s runtime take us out of the 90s seaside resort to show us snippets of an older Sophie, now a mother herself. Without ever seeking chronological clarity or any sort of temporal linearity, the film handles these shifts masterfully, thanks to the precise editing work of Blair McClendon (Kitty Greene’s The Assistant). As a result, the entrancing layering of time and space creates a third, very desirable place, between fact and fiction, where cinema can fulfill its potential of re-enchanting the world it has already recorded.

Early in the festival, Aftersun became the buzziest title not only in the Semaine de la Critique section where it premiered, but also topped many of the competition titles with its impressionistic rendition of the simple story of recollection. Writer-director Charlotte Wells is one for the subtle shifts of mood and feeling, and the way she immortalizes transiency deserves special praise.

This review is from the 2022 Cannes Film Festival. A24 will release Aftersun in the U.S.