Aftersun

I watched this at home on a Tuesday night, alone, which I’d recommend, mostly because of what your face does in the last twenty minutes.

A father and his eleven-year-old daughter are on a package holiday in Turkey in the late nineties, and some of it is being shot on the camcorder they brought with them. Calum is thirty, or about to be. Sophie is a kid with excellent radar and no context whatsoever. And the film is being assembled, we work out slowly, by the adult Sophie, who is now the age her father was that week and is going back through the tapes looking for the thing she couldn’t see at the time.

What levels me is that the tapes don’t cooperate. They show a young man doing tai chi on a balcony, overpaying for a rug, teaching her to dive, being a nuisance about sunscreen, shrugging off a cast on his arm. Nothing on the tape says anything. All the weight sits in the gap between what a camcorder records and what a person now knows to look for, and Wells refuses, over and over, to close that gap for you.

All the weight sits in the gap between what a camcorder records and what a person now knows to look for.

Paul Mescal does something I don’t think I’ve watched anyone do before: he plays a man performing okayness for an audience of one, performs it well enough that you buy it, and only lets the seams show once Sophie is out of the room. There’s a stretch where he’s sitting on the edge of a bed with his back mostly to us that gives out more information than any line in the movie. Frankie Corio is the reason none of it curdles. She’s an actual kid — bored, funny, negotiating, mortified by him in the arcade, absolutely certain the older teenagers by the pool are the interesting people at this resort.

The sound is doing quiet work all week. Pool noise. The nightly resort entertainment, which is exactly as bad as it should be. A PA system, cicadas, water. The video footage brings its own hiss and that hiss is basically the film’s narrator. Then there’s the karaoke scene, where Sophie sings an R.E.M. song by herself because he won’t come up with her, and I paused it. Not for effect. I needed a minute.

I keep seeing the frame where she’s talking to him and he’s only a shape reflected in a dead TV screen, and the strobe-lit dance floor that keeps cutting in from nowhere — a room outside of time where a grown woman is trying to reach somebody across a crowd in flashes a fraction of a second long. The first time it appears it’s just confusing. By the last one it’s unbearable, and the movie has not raised its voice once.

Does it work if you bring nothing to it? Probably, but this is a film that meets you at whatever level of preparation you arrived with, which is a polite way of saying it will find whichever door you left open. I put it on expecting a nice sad indie about a holiday. I got the other thing.

I turned the lights on afterward and sat there a while, which I recognize is precisely the response the movie is engineered to produce, and I didn’t care. Some engineering is honest work.