Aftersun

Preteen Sophie and her thirty-year-old father Calum go on vacation at a seaside resort in Turkey. They go scuba diving, play pool, soak up the sun and laze around. In intimate closeups, we see Calum and Sophie applying cream on each other’s bodies, practising self-defence techniques or filming one another with a camcorder. Days go by, and soon Sophie has to return home to her mother in Scotland.

Charlotte Wells’ autobiographical first feature Aftersun is a tender, deeply felt portrait of this fleeting period, framed through Sophie’s fragmented recollections as an adult. The genuine warmth between father and daughter is punctuated by small frictions that erupt like drops of ink in water, lending their relationship a trace of melancholy.

Set in a non-place of international tourism devoid of local presence and unmoored from history, Wells’ extremely tactile film concretises inchoate memories in specific details of gestures, textures and moods. The sentient, roving camera fixates on the spaces between father and daughter. A zone shot through with affection and anxiety, such that we only get a partial view of Calum, a distant but tangible presence, as incarnated by Paul Mescal (known for Normal People and The Lost Daughter, 2021). With its unhurried dramatic progression and attention to sensuous surfaces, Aftersun captures the atmosphere of languid summer afternoons spent away from home in the company of a loved one.

– Srikanth Srinivasan

The screening on 2 February will be preceded by a video essay by Inge Coolsaet, as part of the Critics' Choice programme.