The Places in Between: Charlotte Wells’s Aftersun

Aftersun, 2022 (Image Credit: Institute of Contermporary Arts)

In the last few moments of Charlotte Wells’s Aftersun, an extended, circular shot follows Calum through the doors of an airport terminal. As he reemerges, unseen, into the darkened venue of a deafening rave, we leave him for the final time, and my own shuddering breaths hitch and falter. I pull the blanket close by my ears, stifling the shaking sobs I knew may come, the kind that made me want to watch this alone, without my mother beside me, dry-eyed and seemingly unaffected. Her ever-gentle, passive eyes cautiously roam my face for answers. I do not offer them, and she awkwardly leaves the room. It seems she isn’t ready to have the conversation, either. At 21, I’m already older than she was when she lost her Dad, and older than my Dad was, too, when he lost his. 

And yet, nothing is truly lost in Aftersun. 

The setting, especially, marks a return for many of us. The cornerstones of a 2000s childhood are strikingly familiar. Karaoke machines, arcades and Irish bars litter the all-inclusive where much of Aftersun takes place. Sloppy first kisses, all-you-can-eat and guided coach tours punctuate hours of lounging in the sun, playing pool and reading gossip magazines. It is the sameness of resorts which has always led me to snobbishly disavow them, each reminder of the past chipping away at the image of opportunity travel is meant to represent. Where is the comfort in continuity? Consistency can be debilitating, I muse, and think of the woodpecker’s precise, insistent chisel. A new place could fix this, I say, and it is a lie.

And yet, it is neither a comforting nor suffocating sameness at the centre of Aftersun, but the slow emergence of something new. Frankie finds herself at a point of genuine discovery, the first many of us ever experience. A fork in the road, the end of a summer: that terrifying summer of in-betweenness, of being too young to understand, but not still so small as to not grasp anything. The summer where ‘Dad’ emerges from a foggy, rose-tinted dream as ‘Calum’, a parent now a man. 

First, we have Calum. Injured from the start (but defiantly cutting off his own cast), he is sometimes estranged, kept back behind glass, self-soothing with tai-chi and really doing quite well, but who nevertheless doesn’t care enough to look both ways before crossing the road (blaring horn ensues) and who can’t always see when the fun has stopped for Sophie. 

Then there’s Sophie, just turned eleven, who flutters precariously between the two stages of life she’s crossed between. She folds clothes and tucks her father into bed, insisting she doesn’t need him to put on the suncream she didn’t question him helping with the day before. Then, all of a sudden, inconsistent in her emerging maturity, she’s not too old (not just yet) for karaoke or hair threads, and she’s certainly too young to know what ‘municipal’ means. 

Charlotte Wells focuses intently on what and how we remember. The camera often drifts to screens or photos, perhaps when Sophie’s memories of the moment they capture become hazy. Ghost-like traces struggle on in VHS and Polaroid, flat, lined with static, but falter beyond their filmic existence. The moments you couldn’t have understood then, as a child on holiday, are filled in with assumption and cynicism as you grow older, like a familiar song warped and remixed. Blur plays loudly and menacingly as we back away from Sophie’s hotel door, and in an exceptionally moving dance scene, Bowie screams that ‘this is our last dance!’ as a nightmarish stroboscope takes hold. 

As adults, our reassessment of childhood can be painful or happy, but usually both. Many may watch Aftersun and wonder, terrified, if we really do just become our parents’ copies. Is it really all so cyclical, as the churning turning of the final scene suggests? Or is it a young girl, whose birthday flows into her father’s, who giggles and, perhaps actually longing to be like him, stands by his side atop a mountain and copies his every tai-chi move? 

As we look back to probe all that simmered silently beneath the surface, there’s a fear that this hidden base will turn out to be the foundation upon which everything else was built. That, as we unearth all we’ve pushed down, the joy will tumble, the last columns of an empire crashing down. Once our parents become people to us, there is a ceaseless, internal march for a sense of justice. The missteps of a man-still-learning are retrospectively condemned as faults unbecoming of a father, as misjudgements which beat angrily on the surface of every photo and video. Calling to be resolved, or more usually just acknowledged, we dangle them as bait above the uneasy peace of a short trip home, a birthday meal, a funeral or wedding. A heavy reminder of what they did when they should, we judge, have known better. 

But what Wells achieves is something different, something triumphant. Over the course of 101 minutes, she crafts a perfectly sculpted and incredibly complex snap-shot of the most delicate balance many of us strive to keep in tandem: the balance of judgement, anger, understanding and forgiveness, usually reserved for family members alone. She proves that the glossy, polished gaze of a child’s eyes is not corrupted by an ageing perspective, but that its gaps are merely plastered over. The joys of childhood holidays are not, upon reevaluation, lost to painful understanding, but merely coloured in deeper, richer shades. Something bad may be gained, but nothing good is lost. And so the tender scalpel chips away, sifting the truth from the strategically misremembered and the selectively forgotten.      

Aftersun is not an easy film to talk about. The stiff upper lip prevails in family matters. What happens behind closed doors insists on staying there, leaving those I’ve asked about it to warily pass inoffensive judgement, skirting over a gaping core we pretend not to see. Then again, perhaps any strong response is merely an indictment of what those close to us laughingly dub our ‘daddy issues’. Perhaps the relief of the credits came easily to many people, an undemanding, uncomplicated reality: I love my Dad. I hope he’s well.   

I suppose as adults we are all living in a period of after-sun: a fallout, a reevaluation, a psychoanalysis well after the golden gleam has worn off. Terrifyingly, the quest for answers or peace may never stop. Aftersun certainly doesn’t quite shake that feeling, or even suggest we should be kinder whilst searching. Sophie and Calum’s story is told with immediacy, honesty, care and devotion, but ultimately lacks judgement. It is an extraordinary feat of filmmaking, and a tender homage to the places in between, the places half-remembered.