Aftersun

(Sample review — replace me.)

There’s a version of this movie that explains itself, and I’m grateful nobody made it. A father and daughter go to a Turkish resort in the late nineties. She’s eleven. He’s thirty, maybe thirty-one, and something is wrong that the movie never names and the daughter can’t see — except she’s the one remembering all of this, twenty years later, scrubbing through the camcorder tapes for the frame where it shows.

The genius is that the tapes don’t cooperate. MiniDV catches him doing tai chi on a balcony, cracking jokes at dinner, teaching her to float. The dread lives entirely in the space between what the camera saw and what the adult woman now knows to look for. I spent the last twenty minutes leaning forward like the answer was going to be in the corner of the frame.

It wasn’t. That’s the point. I turned the lights on after and sat there a while anyway.