Aftersun

A brilliantly assured and stylistically adventurous work, this beautifully understated yet emotionally riveting coming-of-age drama picks apart themes of love and loss in a manner so dextrous as to seem almost accidental. Don’t be fooled; Wells knows exactly what she’s doing, and her storytelling is as precise as it is piercing.

Lemmons’s film is an exercise in memory disguised as Southern gothic.

It’s impossible to deny the immersive, dreamlike quality of Aftersun, which hinges its success on the impressive performances from Mescal and Corio.

A stunning debut that develops with the gradual poignancy of a Polaroid, Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun isn’t just an honest movie about the way that we remember the people we’ve lost — fragmented, elusive, nowhere and everywhere all at once — it’s also a heart-stopping act of remembering unto itself.

Cheers to Scotland’s Charlotte Wells for making the best movie of the year by a first-time writer-director. And cheers to Paul Mescal and young Frankie Corio for bringing this heartfelt father-daughter story to such funny, touching and vital life.

Aftersun, which Wells also wrote, is for the most part a thorough depiction of a brief period in these two peoples’ lives. But its emotional canvas is far more encompassing than this implies.

Bold acrobatics in editing and ambitious creative choices feel all the more superfluous next to Mescal’s effortless charisma.

Aftersun is just such a beautiful film as everything is just beautiful as it makes memories that you will want to stay with you through the good and bad times.

Der Film deutet viele Handlungsstränge an, welcher dann aber nicht fortgesetzt werden. Es passiert nicht DAS Drama, welches man teilweise erwartet. Viel mehr gibt es Nuancen von Melancholie, zu welchen man den Ausgang selber interpretieren muss.

It’s one thing for a movie to be subtle and nuanced, but it’s something else entirely to be enigmatic and cryptic. And, regrettably, the debut feature from writer-director Charlotte Wells delivers more of the latter than the former. This melancholic character study tells the story of a woman (Celia Rowlson-Hall) who looks back 20 years to a vacation that her perky 11-year-old self (Frankie Corio) took with her young and loving but quietly troubled father (Paul Mescal). In doing so, it explores the subjects of memory, parent-child relationships, mental and emotional well-being, and the various senses of loss we all experience over time, topics that the protagonist’s youthful counterpart may not have fully understood at the time but that her adult self now does. I wish I could say the same for myself, though; I often felt that I was being tasked to construct a narrative for the picture myself, based, essentially, on merely what was being shown to me, material that frequently comes across as underdeveloped and open to an array of interpretation in terms of both story line and character development. To put it simply, I didn’t feel I was given enough substance to work with to accomplish that task, and it often left me feeling wanting, abandoned by the filmmaker, and, ultimately, uninterested. And, to complicate matters further, the film’s poor sound quality regularly obscures the characters’ dialogue behind their thick Scottish accents, and its often-dark, overly muddled cinematography made some images difficult to decipher at times. What’s more, this offering’s camera work – aimed at simulating glorified home movies, a fitting approach for telling this story – is packed with innocuous material. Indeed, who really cares about sitting through endless footage of the characters engaging in mundane activities like playing video games, eating ice cream and attempting to sing karaoke? The “looking back in fondness” factor in these supposedly touching segments is a little too inane to engender truly heart-tugging feelings, constituting cinematic padding more than anything integral or meaningful to the overall story. Considering all of the advance glowing reactions I had read about this release, I was really looking forward to it going in. Unfortunately, though, I came away from it almost as sad and disappointed as the protagonist herself.

I looked up the ratings after seeing it because I suspected it only made the theaters by being heavily subsidised. But apparently the critics like it? However, if you would film a boring cheap holiday in an ordinary resort, with not even an interesting excursion (endless posibilities...), only the forced animation (help), then this would be the result. Still very boring. More music could have helped, but even the karaoke is also badly sung! On purpose to pester the audience no doubt. Looking at the uncritical critics reviews its about a depression? Other than that obtained by the viewer a holiday with family is not the right time to be depressed. There are no explications for anything, only some observations of young people by the even younger? Good for a nice videoclip, or two, but hopelessly uninspired. As happens a lot these days. Read books and make movies about them if you can't write a decent story!!!

The type of movie critics love: no plot, no interesting dialogue, nor humor, but it attempts to be profound. Not every movie needs to be an adventure, but it should tell a story. AfterSun’s concept fails because it’s self-reverence and self-indulgence causes it to fail in its most basic task.