Review: 'Aftersun' is an intense slow-burn drama about a daughter's realization of her father's imperfection

When most movies lay out their purpose in rough, impatient strokes that feel like a frontal assault, writer-director Charlotte Wells’ astonishing debut “Aftersun” sneaks stealthily around your defenses, and penetrates your emotional shell with its quietly heartbreaking tale of a daughter starting to understand her father for the first time.

Wells first shows us Sophie at age 11, played by newcomer Frankie Corio, in grainy video footage, waving goodbye at an airport. Holding the camera, we are soon informed, is her father, Calum, played by the Irish actor Paul Mescal. 

As Wells unfolds the story, gradually, we learn a few things. We learn that Calum and Sophie, who live in Scotland, are taking a sunny vacation in Turkey. We learn that it’s sometime in the 1980s or 1990s. We learn that the hotel Calum booked isn’t as nice as advertised, and he’s forced to sleep on a rollaway bed while Sophie takes the room’s nice bed. We see that they spend more of their time at the nicer resort hotel across the street, where there’s a pool, a nice bar, and video games.

We also see that Calum has a cast on his arm, from a broken wrist — and that the details of his injury are murky. We are told, early, that Calum and Sophie’s mom are divorced, but are civil enough to each other, particularly where their daughter is concerned.

The other thing that Wells shows us early in the film: A darkened dance floor, where an adult woman (Celia Rowlson-Hall) is seen when the strobe lights flash. We sense, without being told, that this is Sophie, somewhere around age 30 — and that what we’re seeing of this Turkish vacation is a memory.

Specifically, it’s a memory of when Sophie came to understand that her dad was a human being, flawed and vulnerable — not the superhero that small children usually believe their fathers to be.

What’s incredible is that Wells doesn’t set up some single moment where the switch gets flipped. There’s not a big dramatic scene where everything is suddenly different than it was before. It’s a gradual dawning, an accumulation of evidence, that leads to this realization.

Each viewer who sees “Aftersun” will have a moment where it all clicks into place. And that moment won’t be the same moment for the person sitting next to you. When that moment happens may depend on the viewer’s memory of their own childhood, when they realized their dad (or their mom) was imperfect.

Wells assembles these moments, interspersed with gorgeous images of a lazy summer vacation, into a beautiful whole. She also has found, in Mescal and young Corio, two perfectly paired actors, who are so precisely interlocked and dialed into Wells’ father-daughter dynamic that it’s impossible to assess one performance without considering the other.

“Aftersun” is a movie that seems so contained when it starts, that you may not notice how gradually and thoroughly it’s burrowing into your heart. But once it’s there, you won’t shake it for awhile.

——

‘Aftersun’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, November 11, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated R for some language and brief sexual material. 102 minutes.