Time and memories flow like water in “Aftersun,” the Scottish writer-director Charlotte Wells’ singular feature debut. It is not a generalized sort of tear-jerker about parents and children. It is a film, rather, about one child, as seen from the perspective of the child’s adult self, and one parent, the girl’s fond, troubled father.
Clearly, it found its way on the page, and as filmed, with two excellent leading actors. But something magical occurred when Wells collaborated with the inspired editor Blair McClendon. That’s when the filmmaker saw what she had, and what her mosaic of memory, feeling, loss and love could become.
In the opening seconds of “Aftersun,” we hear the nostalgically glitchy sounds of videotape rewinding in a ‘90s-looking camcorder. A woman, Sophie, is sitting on her couch, playing back some old vacation footage of her 11-year-old self and her barely 30 father. In the footage, the girl is interviewing her dad and asks. “When you were 11, what did you think you’d be doing now?”
There is no reply, at least not the first time we see this in “Aftersun.” The father, Calum, seems thrown by Sophie’s query, and the woman watching the footage years later, in the present, pauses the image. What sort of life did Calum live when he was 11? What sort of relationship did he have with Sophie’s mother? Most films would take pains to spell out the answers, eventually. “Aftersun” works more obliquely and poetically, leaving prosaic touches to other filmmakers.
The premise is simplicity itself. Calum and Sophie have embarked on a holiday at a Turkish seaside hotel. They apparently do not see much of each other, but their bond is strong and fond.
They use the pool. They swim in the sea. They meet some fellow vacationers. They navigate the days together. Little by little, but never too much, the characters reveal bits about themselves, either to us or to each other and sometimes both.
“I’m surprised I made it to 30,” Calum says at one point. He references a violent past, and we see him practicing what appears to be tai chi. Sadness lurks behind his broad, kind smile. Calum is played by the beguiling Paul Mescal, best known in the U.S. for the Hulu-streaming series “Normal People,” and he’s a subtle, fascinating paradox. His portrayal gives us a man who is rock-steady in his love for Sophie, but in his own life, the rocks have begun to slide a bit. In one scene (a rare one where he’s on his own), Calum asks about the cost of a Persian rug Sophie has mentioned she admires. The man’s frustrations, his probable struggles and self-image, emerge quietly but clearly here and throughout “Aftersun.”
Sophie is played by Frankie Corio, with brief appearances in the older-Sophie scenes by Celia Rowlson-Hall. Corio and Mescal shine together, their characters’ easy times and tougher ones. At the hotel, Sophie hangs around, and then with an older group of teens who take a social interest in her. Sex, boys, girls, drinking: Sophie listens to every word without seeming to. A boy roughly Sophie’s age is a regular at the video arcade; Sophie gets to know him a bit, and then, tentatively, he becomes her first kiss in a scene of unusual, bittersweet authenticity. Later, on a swimming raft with her dad, Sophie relays what happened. Calum, who is given to bouts of depression (we see him weeping, one night, in the hotel room), responds to his daughter’s account with an intuitive parent’s openness and heartfelt desire to see his daughter get through childhood as unbruised as humanly possible.
By design, the tenderness of “Aftersun” is counterweighed by a lot of realistic tension, amped up, subtly, mostly, by the score and the sound design. Calum and Sophie break off on their own, separately, later in the vacation. Some of that tension is achieved by familiar means: Gradually the soundtrack becomes an aural landscape of potential danger. Some of this feels more engineered than imagined or felt. But Wells is trying to dramatize the everyday threat levels children face, in different ways, with or without a parent on the job.
Throughout “Aftersun” we’re shown tantalizing, strobe-lit flashes of a dance-floor rave in progress. In these eyeblink images, Calum and Sophie share a kind of psychic space together, at different stages of their lives, depending on the shot sequence. There’s no one insight being shared in these images, or the film itself. Wells works in a more oblique realm, though the imagery is crystal clear in its evocation of feelings any parent, any child, might feel about family, or the past, or the present. I don’t want to oversell it — plenty have already — because it’s a clear-eyed poem of remembering, made from material usually treated as heart-tugging prose. (Spoiler: Hearts will be tugged nonetheless.)
It took Wells many years to develop and complete “Aftersun,” with the patient backing of “Moonlight” director Barry Jenkins’ production company. A second viewing helped me figure out some questions I had, and still have, about some of Wells’ decisions. Here’s what I learned: It’s OK to have reservations, and then to have reservations about those reservations. Much like “Moonlight,” “Aftersun” is formally beautiful enough to warrant the second viewing — and moving enough, without going for the throat, to warrant the first.
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'AFTERSUN'
3.5 stars (out of 4)
MPAA rating: R (for brief sexual material and some language)
Running time: 1:36
How to watch: Now in theaters
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