Aftersun.

Aftersun is the debut feature from director Charlotte Wells, a lovely, bittersweet slice of memory that avoids big moments or clear answers. Featuring two outstanding performances by Paul Mescal and newcomer Frankie Corio, it gets under your skin, and lingers on the palate afterwards like a dessert with complex flavors. (You can rent it on Amazon, iTunes, etc., or watch free on MUBI outside of the U.S.)

Mescal and Corio are Calum, a single dad, and his daughter Sophie, who embark on a long father-daughter vacation with a tour group to Turkey to celebrate his upcoming 31^st birthday and her 11^th birthday. It’s around the year 1999, based on some of the music (Blur’s “Tender” was released that year), and the two have brought a handheld video camera on the trip, allowing Wells to present some scenes as they would have been recorded by Calum or Sophie. As the trip progresses, it becomes clear that Calum is not doing well, as he shows signs of depression and makes offhand comments that offer a slight glimpse into his inner turmoil. That trip constitutes nearly all of the film; there’s just one brief scene afterwards, as we see an adult Sophie watching the end of the videotape(s) we’ve been watching with her.

To say more about Aftersun risks breaking the spell it casts upon the audience. I have a vague memory of an interview Tom Petty gave around 1991, saying that part of Bob Dylan’s genius as a songwriter was the way he could just drop you into a story without giving you all sorts of prologue or introduction; you’re just right in the story from the start, and he figures you’ll catch up. Aftersun functions exactly like that: There’s almost no introduction to these two characters, other than a brief scene near the start where we learn about their ages and imminent birthdays. Wells allows us to learn about the characters through dialogue, such as that Sophie’s mum and Calum are divorced, or that she lives with her mum in Scotland and only visits Calum in London occasionally – or for a special trip like this one. It is a difficult way to tell a story, but Wells executes it flawlessly. By the end of Aftersun, you know Sophie, and you know Calum well enough to try to understand him as adult Sophie is likely trying to do by watching these old videos. He’s not declining over the course of the trip, but we see the vicissitudes of his mental state, sometimes through Sophie, but also sometimes when he’s on his own, raising the question of how much of what we see actually happened and how much is Sophie trying to fill in the gaps.

Both Mescal and Corio are superb in Aftersun, as they must be, with virtually no other characters getting more than a few lines. I had only seen Mescal in his small role in The Lost Daughter, and he is a presence here, with instant credibility as a young, single dad, adrift in his life, loving his daughter and increasingly aware of his deficiencies (or perhaps exaggerating them) as a father. Corio had never acted in anything prior to Aftersun, which is just shocking given the performance she delivers here, playing a kid her own age with the aplomb of an actor who’s playing down a few years. Sophie is trying to figure out her dad while she’s also at an age when she’s trying to figure out herself – her interactions with some teenagers staying at the resort are unrelated to the father-daughter storyline but crucial both in expanding our understanding of her character and in anchoring us to the time in her life when all of this is occurring. Corio gets even tiny details right, like the look on her face when the teens first invite her to come hang out with them, without her dad; she’s there, quietly smiling, but also so clearly absorbing everything she can take in, as if she’s studying this alien species, the Teenager, to better understand them.

Aftersun ends on an ambiguous note, and I’m fine with that in this case. This isn’t a mystery or thriller that demands explanation. The actual details don’t matter for the narrative in the film – what happened after the camera stopped rolling, so to speak, is immaterial. If anything, Wells’ choice not to give any sort of epilogue redirects your thinking back to what you did see and pushes us into adult Sophie’s perspective. It’s one of the best films I’ve seen from 2022, a story to be experienced, one that touches on universal facets of childhood and parenthood – yet another film about how we can never truly understand our parents – while also telling a very specific story about two very realistic and memorable characters.