Aftersun (Charlotte Wells, 2022)

"At a vacation resort, 11-year-old Sophie treasures the time she spends with her loving and idealistic father. Twenty years later, Sophie reminisces about their last holiday together as she tries to come to terms with the man she didn't always know."

 

man, this is getting CRAZY hype the past week or so.

Can't wait, Paul Mescal is also definitely the next big thing

 

well, this was wonderful and devastating

 

@everyone

please watch this so we can talk about it here

 

Caught this tonight and liked it. Excellent performances from the two leads

 

getting this next weekend

 

Bought tickets for this when I woke up today before realizing it was the anni of my dad dying when I was the daughter’s age in this and it went about as you’d expect lmao

Hurt so good. Film of the year for me, probably.

 

Can someone explain this film to me? I liked it, but I feel like I’m missing something.

 

What didn’t you understand?

 

The relevance of the rave/dancing scenes, her watching them in the present, etc.

My friend theorized the dad died by suicide but I don’t know where she got that?

 

I mean it’s a retelling of the last vacation Charlotte Wells took with her estranged father before he died.

Looking back on it as an adult (and a new mother), she sees him as someone who loved her deeply but was struggling tremendously in many ways.

 

Ah, I didn’t know that!

 

Maybe not as high on this as some, but this was good. Quietly heartbreaking.

I assume the rave scenes were a visual representation of Sophie trying to understand her father through recontextualizing moments from their trip. Seems like she's trying to reach him in those brief scenes, though it was kind of hard to tell with how strobing they were.

 

i wanted to like this more than i did. thought the performances were great but outside of that, didn't feel like there was a lot of there there

 

i agree the rave scenes weren't really communicated that well. there were scenes where it looked like he was trying to hug her and she was pushing him away, which seems tonally different from how we see her grown up in the few present scenes?

my wife thought the rave represented the dad sinking into darkness/solitude after the vacation, which i guess lines up with what the director has said about it being the last time she saw her dad. my wife also seemed to read the dad was closeted but i didn't really get that vibe

 

I took it as them just meeting in the darkness.

She wasn’t sure if she wanted to push him away or console him/hold on to him a little longer. She didn’t know him as a man when she was a little girl. She understood him and his depression as an adult (and new mother).

Seemed to me like she grew up angry with him for leaving her behind and kind of started to understand why when she really started looking back on it.

he tells the scuba instructor that his daughter is really the only reason he’s still going - the final shot is Calum watching his daughter board her flight and then walking back through the swinging door only to be consumed by darkness

 

yeah i got all that, those parts seem pretty clear

 

Took me a while to finally watch this.....


but daaaamn. Thought it wasn't living up to the hype until the Under Pressure scene that imo from then on made it become transcendent and wrecked me. probably top 5 of the year

 

A beautiful film. So tender and humane.

 

Finally watching this now!

 

This was really good and also really sad. I loved it.

 

Watched this last night and 100% agree. I definitely liked the movie a good amount before that scene but from there through the final shot, everything just devastated me (and made a lot of what came before hit harder, esp. putting the strobing club scenes in more context). I think this letterboxd review sums up a lot of what it made me feel as someone who also lost a family member before I really got to know/understand them. You hang on to what you have of them and try to make sense of it all, but you'll never fully get there.

 

Man

 

My girlfriend was sobbing by the end of this, I thought it looked and sounded amazing but couldn't really engage with it emotionally or narratively

 

This was really good. The final shot was pretty devastating.