Normally the remembrance of a pivotal holiday is a thing of wonder and nostalgic charm.
A respite from the incessantly exhausting demands of the everyday world, holidays usually represent something to be treasured and held in rose-tinted awe, an escape from the failings of the world-weary present that’s wrapped in a pleasingly escapist aura of a hallowed past event.
But in Aftersun, an adult Sophia (Celia Rowlson-Hall), otherwise happy with her wife and young child, is caught in a bittersweet loop of remembering the final holiday she ever took with her beloved father, Calum (Paul Mescal).
A loving, caring father who uses the little money at his disposal to treat his then-11-year-old daughter to a two-week resort holiday in Turkey, Calum is, on the face of it, always there for the child he shares with his ex with whom he is on friendly terms, even going so far as calling her family.
He is, to all intents and purposes, a happy man who’s delighted to be with his daughter in a holiday cocoon where the only demands on a given day are grabbing a nice dinner, seeing what entertainment is on offer – the resort is one of those quirky all-in-one resorts so beloved of British holidaymakers – and going on excursions to restorative mud tips, supposedly once used by Cleopatra.
But beneath all the happiness and kidding around, and Paul genuinely adores Sophie (Frankie Coro who is just brilliant), is a darker side to Calum who is clearly struggling with entrenched depression that is only expressed when he is not with Sophie.
He appears to be trying to ameliorate the worst effects of it by practising Tai chi and meditation but the effect only appears to be temporary and much of his time is spent disguising the true state of his melancholy from Sophie.
Disguised it might be but it’s non unapparent to Sophie who can sense that something is not right.
In one of the many slice-of-slice moments in this gently unhurried film that uses snippets of their holiday activities and old video recordings to take us on holidays with father and daughter, Sophie doesn’t see her dad throw her mask on a diving expedition and the expensive piece of kit ends up falling to the sea floor far below.
Calum acts as if it’s no big deal but he is upset and Sophie can sense something off and apologises as she snuggles into him in affectionate apology.
On another occasion, Calum uncharacteristically refuses to join his daughter on stage in a karaoke comp she’s signed them up for, and afterwards, with Calum withdrawn and Sophie upset, they spend the rest of the evening apart.
Nothing happens to Sophie, and she ends up having her first romantic kiss with a sweet young guy her age, but when she finally gets into the room with a key from reception, she finds Calum passed out naked, his arms dangling off her bed in a sign that something bad has been aborted but only just.
These troubling moments sit seamlessly juxtaposed in with the bucolic scenes of a holiday so lovely that Sophie wishes one night at dinner that they could live in the hotel and never leave; she realises, even at 11, that that’s simply not possible but, along with wishing for a yellow bedroom and poetic musings about how you can be physically separated from someone but still near them because you’re under the same sunny sky, it speaks to a child who wants the world to be more romantically wonderful than she knows it actually is.
She likely senses that her dad isn’t as bucolically happy as she works so hard to appear but since his love for her is so palpably genuine, she can lose herself happily in the beautifully enveloping bond they share.
Interspersed through the sun-soaked fragments of holiday recollection are strobe-lit dance sequences where a grown woman, later revealed to be an adult Sophie, is trying to reach a man, slowly shown to be Calum, across a crowded dancefloor.
It’s not clear at first what purposes these jagged video segments serve, especially as Aftersun takes its very much much welcome time telling the story of an otherwise happy holiday beset by an undercurrent of depression, possible suicide (it’s implied that after he waved Sophie off at the airport that Calum never went back to the UK himself) and impending loss, but as we see father and daughter do their best to make this a holiday to remember, it becomes increasingly clear that they are the troubled dreams of an adult Sophie trying to reach her father, finally getting him only to have him tumble away from her, impossibly far out of reach again.
As a poetic metaphor of what is clear lingering loss that still troubles her as an adult, its potent, a symbol not just of a loss of connection but of someone trying to reconcile the smiling, happy, caring father she knew with the man best by depression and suicidal ideation that eventually took him from her.
Aftersun is both a profoundly moving exploration of the loss of innocence and childhood, best exemplified by Sophie’s prescient realisation that you can’t stay on holidays forever, but of grief too as it empathetically underscores that the loss of someone never really leaves you.
In fact, the loss can remain so palpable and so rawly open that you return to it again and again, and that while you should see something as happy as a holiday as nothing but a joy, it is forever bittersweet and broken by what follows afterwards (though, of course, we never see it).
However, what you are left with most strongly in Aftersun is the sense of a love so powerful, father for daughter particularly but also vice versa, that it impels a man emotionally limping through life to channel all his remaining care and concern into cocooning his beautiful daughter, both at the time of the holiday and later by mailing a postcard assuring her of his undying love, and while what you are left with as a viewer, much like Sophie as a grieving grown daughter, is loss, you are reminded too of the treasure that comes from being so unconditionally, universally loved.
It doesn’t save Sophie from great enduring sadness but it is rich and valuable nonetheless and while there is a lingering sense of melancholy during and after Aftersun‘s thoughtfully nuanced and quietly and slowly spooled out sequences, there is also the comforting of how great an impact the unreserved love of a parent can have and how it stays with me long after it has actively ceased to exist.