There's a time in early middle age when, as adults, we reflect back on moments in our childhood and realise that our parents were barely coping. Or perhaps not coping at all. Aftersun is a film about such a realisation, framed as a kind of extended flashback.
It begins with footage from a camcorder, shot by 11-year-old Scottish girl Sophie, holidaying with her father Calum in a Turkish seaside resort.
It's the 90s. Techno and Britpop have swept through Europe, Road Rage by Catatonia is one of the songs of the summer… and so is the Macarena. Calum (Paul Mescal, Normal People), a divorcee in his early 30s, has come to spend quality time with daughter Sophie (Frankie Corio) and celebrate his birthday.
In their modest hotel room, soon after they've checked in, she playfully interrogates him with the camcorder: "When you were 11 what did you think you'd be doing now?"
He pauses. The question unsettles him, but the moment has soon passed.
It's only when we see the same scene again later, after we've learnt a lot more about him, that we see the question for what it is: an arrow that has found a gap in his psychological armour.
Aftersun is a strikingly perceptive, subtly queer, coming-of-age film by Scottish first-time writer-director Charlotte Wells. It contrasts the seemingly innocuous — and at times joyous — experiences of this summer holiday with the deeper undertow of desperation that Calum tries to hide from his daughter.
The video footage as framing device infers that, many years after the events, the adult Sophie is watching. Aftersun, we soon realise, is her reverie; her nostalgic reflection on a cherished chapter in her life – infused with a more adult understanding of her father.
Mescal plays Calum as patient, supportive and gentle-natured, but there are devastating glimpses of his character's vulnerability. Corio, meanwhile, displays effortless charisma as the young Sophie, slightly tomboyish in her battered trainers, devoid of any precociousness.
Watching them together on screen is a precious and tender experience.
The film itself seems to revel in being with them, sharing their playful banter during alfresco meals, or as they lounge by the pool or hang out in the room.
But in one scene, we realise this is no longer a memory, but a re-imagining: As Sophie sleeps in bed, the camera pans to her father on a balcony alone. More than once in the film we see Calum alone like this, as if adult Sophie is trying to fill in the gaps of what she knows about her father. The camera, which lingers gently, expresses a kind of empathy for his solitude.
Wells's father died when she was 16, and she has said that while her film is not based on him, he was a source of inspiration. The emotional truth of the movie speaks to the lived experience of growing up with a parent who has severe mental health challenges.
The film's dramatic power creeps up on you, as the languid tempo of the holiday, the lounging around, even Calum's daily tai chi routines, become, gradually, synonymous with his depression.
Sophie, meanwhile, is at best only vaguely aware of this, as she begins to explore the world independently, hanging out with the older kids at the resort, watching them flirting and drinking.
In coming-of-age films there is always a rupture of sorts between children and their parents, and Calum and Sophie go separate ways for an entire evening in the film's climactic and saddest sequence.
While Sophie wanders lost through the darkened grounds of the resort, enduring an awkward romantic encounter with a boy and gazing upon a queer couple kissing in a doorway, her father's evening teeters on the brink of disaster.
Wells's restraint in directing here is commendable. In one small gesture — Calum bends down to pick up somebody else's discarded cigarette and begins smoking it – she expresses his unravelling.
Not that the film is always understated: A recurring sequence on a dancefloor, where revellers dance to strobe lights in slow motion, is perhaps a little overloaded with symbolism.
But in this mythical space – evocative of the club scene that transformed European youth culture in the 90s — the adult Sophie and her father come together in a way that expresses the film's deep longing and sadness.
It's a motif that, by the end, comes laden with the emotional ballast of everything that the young Sophie is unable, or ill-equipped, to say.
But the most moving reunion is between the two versions of Sophie, which occurs in a bravura long take, where the video footage becomes embedded within the film we are watching. The two periods of Sophie's life melt into each other, combining the themes of memory, identity and grief in a heart-rending finale.
Aftersun is in cinemas now.
