X
- 2022
- R
- A24
- 1 h 42 m
- 2022
- R
- A24
- 1 h 42 m
Summary Sophie reflects on the shared joy and private melancholy of a holiday she took with her father twenty years earlier. Memories real and imagined fill the gaps between miniDV footage as she tries to reconcile the father she knew with the man she didn’t.
Directed By: Charlotte Wells
Written By: Charlotte Wells
- 2022
- R
- A24
- 1 h 42 m
- 2022
- R
- A24
- 1 h 42 m
Aftersun
8.3
Where to Watch
Summary Sophie reflects on the shared joy and private melancholy of a holiday she took with her father twenty years earlier. Memories real and imagined fill the gaps between miniDV footage as she tries to reconcile the father she knew with the man she didn’t.
Directed By: Charlotte Wells
Written By: Charlotte Wells
Where to Watch
Top Cast
Metascore
Universal Acclaim
Based on 46 Critic Reviews
95
98% Positive
45 Reviews
45 Reviews
2% Mixed
1 Review
1 Review
0% Negative
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
Metascore
Universal Acclaim
Based on 46 Critic Reviews
95
98% Positive
45 Reviews
45 Reviews
2% Mixed
1 Review
1 Review
0% Negative
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
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.
User Score
Universal Acclaim
Based on 248 User Ratings
8.3
84% Positive
209 Ratings
209 Ratings
10% Mixed
24 Ratings
24 Ratings
6% Negative
15 Ratings
15 Ratings
User Score
Universal Acclaim
Based on 248 User Ratings
8.3
84% Positive
209 Ratings
209 Ratings
10% Mixed
24 Ratings
24 Ratings
6% Negative
15 Ratings
15 Ratings
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.
После солнце, восхищений сезон и скоро выйдет дата, скорее будем смотреть и хороший сериал!
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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.
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I applaud the naturalness with which the performances register the events unfolding on screen, because this was crucial to how this film worked.
Not because of the chemistry of the characters, but because they kept you focused on moving forward with the story, since at the end of the day, all we are watching is the vacation of a father and daughter that, without much conflict in between, would make you wonder more than once what was the point of watching it.
And that clashes with the enormous ambiguity of its plot, which is a double-edged sword, because one way or another, the film will have a very different resonance depending on the viewer and I think it will impact much more those who feel identified, which is not bad, but at least I see it within the overall perspective of its drama, and Aftersun is nothing more than a reconstruction of memories and how they tend to be manipulated by our own mind and we have the idea that something that happened at the time was nicer than it really was, and it is that when you face them with a different age and a different experience you understand perfectly well what it was, or in many cases you don't. That's why I think its conclusion is the part that left the most lasting impression on a large part of the audience.
A very enjoyable film, but I don't think it's worthy of the mark it's making.
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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!!!
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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.
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Production Company
BBC Film,
British Film Institute (BFI),
Screen Scotland,
Tango Entertainment (III),
PASTEL,
Unified Theory,
AZ Celtic Films
Release Date Oct 21, 2022
Duration 1 h 42 m
Rating R
Genres
Awards
Academy Awards, USA
• 1 Nomination
British Independent Film Awards
• 7 Wins & 16 Nominations
CinEuphoria Awards
• 3 Wins & 11 Nominations
