I am currently suffering an emotional hangover the morning after seeing Aftersun (2022). Ironic when, by all accounts, it would theoretically not be a movie I liked.
For most of my life, one major gripe I have (had?) with art films is that I just didn't get them. If they didn't have a plot that propels them from point A to point B, or compelling character arcs, or some inciting incident to spark the progression of the story, I didn't have the patience to sit through what—to me—was pointless filler.
Charlotte Wells' directorial feature film debut is absolutely one of those films without any real plot; it was more a series of lingering shots of bodies (both people and water) than a story. And yet, I left the cinema feeling more emotionally affected than I had been in a very long time.
Actually, I need to pause the point I was making here to talk about this real quick: it boggles my mind that this was Wells' directorial debut. This was her first feature film. Her first. I still cannot wrap my brain around that. I watched Till (2022) a few weeks back and could easily see that it was the director's first feature film; I remember thinking, 'This director has yet to find their unique style,' which is absolutely fine—all firsts are usually kind of crap.
Wells, on the other hand, clearly had no such issue, delivering a career-distinguishing piece right off the bat. Not only does she know exactly what her style is, that style is also unabashedly brilliant. The transitions she adopts (eg. the sillhouette of a sleeping Sophie jumping to the same shape of her father waking up in daylight), the composition of the soundtrack (which I will touch on in more depth later), the angles of certain shots (Calum's most vulnerable moments almost never shows his face, instead focusing on, to name a few, his sobbing back, or his reflection in a darkened TV), the constant juxtaposition of light and dark, fluid to jumpy, close-ups to wide-angles; all carefully curated to deliver a powerful emotional experience.
Anyway. Back to my point.
As a theatre kid, many of the films I love are those that read like a stage production. This is probably where my need for a story-driven movie comes from. But Aftersun decisively does not read like a play. It reads like a song.
Like songs, Aftersun does not follow a Freytag-pyramidian structure to tell a story. It does not demand your attention to propel you from the exposition to denoument, nor introduce you to unfamiliar characters and worlds. There's no real conflict that Wells corporealises at any point.
Like songs, Aftersun simply uses the experiences of the author to evoke emotion in the consumer. Like songs, this film holds a mirror up to the audience and says, Doesn't this feel familiar? Haven't you been here before? We've never met, but don't you know how I feel?
At many points throughout the movie, I would come back into myself only to realise that I had a smile on my face, or tears running down my cheeks. Not necessarily because the film has done anything particularly uplifting or heartwrenching. But—despite not having/being a single father, never having been to Turkey, nor do I come from a broken family—because I kept feeling like I know them. I know that precocious child who hogs the film camera. I know the father who shows his daughter card tricks. I know the helpless, lonely sobbing of someone who never thought they'd make it past their 20s.
And where I didn't know them, I wished I did. I wished for a parent who says "you can tell me anything" and mean it. I wished for a parent who would let me explore the world on my own, even when they feared for my safety. I wished for the innocence you only have before the first major traumatic event that eventually comes to us all.
I have to pay special tribute to the orchestration of this movie (is that the word for it, the choice of music?), done by the masterful Oliver Coates. I think without the atmospheric synths accompanying each minimal-dialogue, vibe-y shot the movie would not have the same impact, and the music itself was flawlessly composed to hit all the right emotional spots. And this review(?) would be remiss without mentioning the Under Pressure remix used in the most tumultuous scene in the movie. Just thinking about it springs tears to my eyes. Again, it was one of those times where I knew this feeling, I knew this man. I grieved for the version of me that saw herself in that scene.
Without having read anything about the movie, I am guessing that the final shot of the movie, of the man walking out of the airport and into a darkened room of dancing bodies, only visible in sharp bursts of light, was him disappearing from Sophie's life by suicide.
There were a few points in the story was I was certain the man was going to die. First was when he dove for Sophie's goggles and the next line we get is of Sophie saying "everything will be fine", then a long shot of the ocean where we never see him surface. The other was of the man drunkenly wading into the ocean deep in the middle of the night, until he is out of our sight and again, we never see him surface. That one was especially difficult, as Sophie and her father had had a bad day, and Sophie could not get into her room. Wells does a masterful job of crafting a feeling of dread each time.
I'm seeing now the recurring theme of the ocean symbolising death, maybe. Or peace. Maybe they're the same thing. Oddly enough, the day before I went to see this movie, I had had Swallowed In The Sea by Coldplay stuck in my head. You belong with me / Not swallowed in the sea. Imagine having that in your brain as you watched this movie. Double whammy.
I loved the way this film alludes to grief, loss, and suicide by utilising heavy metaphor (like songs!) or imagery. Obviously there is the patchy rave shots, but also the handful of scenes of adult Sophie with her own child, and obviously the vast blue expanse of the ocean and the sky. These scenes were usually dropped in with no prelude or conclusion, the same way verses in a song will often jump topic to topic to create one cohesive track.
This film is a masterclass in pulling emotions from the viewer, and despite how nothing technically ever goes wrong and no death actually happens, this is probably the most grief I've felt walking away from a movie theatre since Tony Stark's death in Avengers: Endgame (2019). Highly recommend to anyone who needs a good cry.
PS: random thought for my fellow theatre nerds—Aftersun is the movie equivalent of Fun Home, right? I'm not the only one who sees that?