FAINT WAVES

Aftersun, a film from 2022 (that I didn’t watch until 2023), written and directed by Charlotte Wells.

This movie caught me completely off guard. I watched it on a whim after seeing a few clips that A24 had uploaded of the film; the few scenes I saw were recommended to me by the notorious YouTube algorithm (to their credit, they were right to show me this film). I found the clips so striking and atmospheric, I was intrigued enough to seek the film out and ended up renting it digitally at the time. 

The premise is relatively simple; it’s essentially just a young father and his daughter (whom he presumably had at a very young age) on holiday in the 1990’s. How that coming-of-age story is framed, structured, and told, however, is not simple in the least. To this day, I cannot tell you with absolute certainty what the true narrative intent of the film is. It’s open to interpretation, I think. People may have views on what it is, but we’re not going to get the same things out of this film, no one is. There’s an abstract sort of dreaminess to the film as it lilts along with clips and vignettes, flowing like water in and out of each other. Some of that comes from the structure and how the film is presented, at times shown through the lens of a camcorder merely recording this father-daughter vacation. It gives the story a languid feel, a sort of hazy innocence hanging over the thing; perhaps that innocence is supposed to represent the view of the daughter in the story. Who am I to say.

I won’t get into how magnificent of a film it is and how it moved me to tears by the end, nor will I explain what I took away from the film. Rather, I want to focus on the presentation and how that too has stuck with me since having seen it. There’s an ambience, an aura to this film that I think very few films capture. Directed by Charlotte Wells, with cinematography by Gregory Oke and editing by Blair McClendon, what these people achieve together from a visual standpoint is truly profound. No shot is wasted, you could maybe accuse some of lingering, but they linger for good reason. There’s an inherent warmth and nostalgia, not just due to the surroundings of the characters but how the shots are visually presented. I’m not presented with anything to make me disbelieve that it’s the late 1990’s. That sort of feeling, coupled with the interspersed shots and sequences filmed on an actual Mini-DV camera, translates to a strange and beautiful piece of cinema. These sort of wandering visual abstractions have largely been reserved for the short-form, such as commercials and music videos, but this is an entire film in that artistic space. Couple that with the beautiful narrative elements we’re given and it makes for a poignant and memorable piece of film.

Aftersun is available to stream on Paramount and available to rent on Apple TV.