A Father-Daughter Vacation Brings Some Baggage

Frankie Corio and Paul Mescal 
in "Aftersun"
Photo Credit: RottenTomatoes.com

While a vacation is meant to be a time of relaxation and fun, movies have shown us that there’s also a chance to contemplate on your getaway and try to work out any issues that might have built up between you and your loved ones.  What writer-director Charlotte Wells does with her feature filmmaking debut in the mediative drama, “Aftersun,” is bring us on a trip to observe the deeper layers of the father-daughter relationship at its center.

Calum (Paul Mescal) is a divorced father who, along with his 11-year-old daughter, Sophie (Frankie Corio), travels to Turkey for a vacation.  Twenty years later, an older Sophie (Celia Rowlson-Hall) reflects on the time she spent  with him and ponder the sides of her father that he was hesitant to reveal.

Mescal delivers a tender performance that shows a loving and attentive father, but also displays something that’s quietly heartbreaking that allows us to wonder what’s troubling his mind.  Throughout the film, Mescal gives moving work as a parent who tries to provide his daughter with some time away and does his best to connect with her.  However, throughout the first half of the film, there are faint traces of melancholy in his demeanor that expand into something deeper in the second half, showing us more of Calum’s brokenness and leaving us to ponder what’ll become of his and Sophie’s relationship as he keeps everything bottled up for her sake.

Corio is wonderful in a breakout performance as a young girl who shows hints of adventurousness as she takes in the foreign surroundings, sharing her father’s eagerness to explore and attempt new things.  Corio shows Sophie as someone who tries to bring herself across as mature for her age, occasionally showing a desire to go off on her own once in a while to be with others, sometimes hanging out with people a little older than her so she can exhibit her maturity.  It’s a maturity that’s rooted in something that’s a little more poignant than expected, all in a character who tends to make decisions for herself and handle things on her because she knows, as if on some deeper level, that her father won’t be around forever.

Although Wells’ screenplay is more character-driven than plot-driven, which causes it to meander a tad from time to time, Wells combats this by inserting some details here and there that hint at what’s going on behind the scenes in Calum’s life.  When we have the fleeting glimpses into the future, it doesn’t feel like we’re short changed from not seeing more of that side of the story.  Instead, having only the briefest of views in the future allows more room for speculation, letting us save most of the analyzing power for the timeline in the past to see clues as to what might cause the tension that we see in the quick glimpses of the future.

As a director, Wells offers some understated work in having us experiencing the figurative distance from the characters, all with the help of cinematography by Gregory Oak.  In order to emphasize the ambiguity of what’s going on in the lives of Calum and Sophie and what they’re keeping from us, Oak and Wells sometimes have us view these characters through a glass barrier (such as a phone booth or a sliding balcony door) or through a TV screen as a video camera hooked to the TV films them as they record vacation videos.  Other times, there won’t be any sense of separation, with us getting closeups of Calum and Sophie being together and having us analyze them in those spaces, or viewing them separately to see how they experience time on their own.  We get the feeling of being both opened to and closed off from the characters, going back and forth between those sensations and feeling absorbed in what we try to learn about Calum and Sophie.

In the case of “Aftersun,” the beauty isn’t just in the locales, but in the characters and the look into their lives.

Grade: A-