Aftersun

01The Premise

Sophie (Frankie Corio) is eleven. Her dad, Calum (Paul Mescal), is about to turn thirty-one. He and Sophie’s mum have split up, and this holiday at a modest resort on Turkey’s southwest coast is their time together. Very little happens, on purpose: the pool, a scuba trip, the mud baths, a karaoke night.

Calum is easy company and hard to read. He does tai chi, reads self-help books, and smokes on the balcony when he thinks Sophie can’t see. Mescal plays him as a man holding himself together with real effort. Corio had never acted before, and she plays Sophie as a kid who notices more than she can put into words.

He tries to be the best dad he can, down to the smallest things. In the hotel room he takes the little fold-out bed and gives Sophie the big one. At the pool he rubs sun cream into her back. It’s clear he wants to be good, and just as clear that he can’t.

Every so often the film cuts forward to Sophie as an adult (Celia Rowlson-Hall), now about the age her dad was, watching the old tapes. And there’s a third place that belongs to neither time: a dark room full of strobe light, where the grown-up Sophie keeps catching sight of her father in the crowd.

02Production

Wells is from Edinburgh. Her father died when she was sixteen, and she has called Aftersun emotionally autobiographical. When she was a teenager he gave her a MiniDV camera, and while writing the script she watched old tapes he had shot of her, sometimes taking dialogue from them. She set the film in Turkey because she had been on holiday there at Sophie’s age and still had the photographs.

She made it with people she had studied with. Oke and the editor, Blair McClendon, were at NYU Tisch with her, and Oke, a British cinematographer based in Berlin, had shot her short Laps (2017). Oliver Coates wrote the score. Adele Romanski, Amy Jackson, Barry Jenkins and Mark Ceryak produced it for Pastel and Unified Theory, with backing from BBC Film, the BFI and Screen Scotland, which put in £350,000 of production funding.

The shoot was in Ölüdeniz, a seaside resort near Fethiye, from the last week of June 2021 to the first week of August, after about six weeks of preparation. Temperatures reached about 45°C. The camera was kept cool with ice packs and reflective blankets, and the schedule was built around the hours Corio could work each day.

Aftersun premiered in Critics’ Week at Cannes on 21 May 2022 and won the French Touch Prize of the Jury, in the first year that prize was given. A24 bought it for the US and Canada at the festival, and Mubi took it in the UK and Ireland. It opened the 2022 Edinburgh International Film Festival and reached American cinemas on 21 October and British ones on 18 November.

The prizes followed. Mescal was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor, which went to Brendan Fraser for The Whale. Of four BAFTA nominations the film won one, Outstanding Debut, for Wells. In her speech she said that most of the crew had been Turkish and spoke about the earthquakes earlier that month. She also called the film a eulogy for her father. At the British Independent Film Awards it won seven prizes, among them Best British Independent Film and Best Cinematography for Oke, and Sight and Sound’s critics’ poll named it the best film of 2022.11Wells also won the Directors Guild of America’s award for a first-time feature director, the Michael Apted Award, in February 2023. The film was named Best First Feature at the Independent Spirit Awards and Best First Film by the New York Film Critics Circle, and Wells took the Gotham Awards’ breakthrough director prize. In 2025 the New York Times placed it 78th on its list of the 100 best films of the 21st century.

03The Camcorder

The camcorder was not in the script at first. Wells has said it gave the film a literal point of view, and something to anchor it to what really happened on the holiday. Inside the story it is Sophie’s camera, and its footage is cut in all the way through. Mescal and Corio operated the DV cameras themselves, so the tape was made by the two people in it.22No Film School, citing IMDb, gives the camcorders as Panasonic NV-DS77 EG and NV-DS55B models. I haven’t found a second source for that.

That arrangement sets the rules. A tape can only hold what was in front of the lens while somebody was pressing record. It has one vantage point at a time, most often an eleven-year-old’s, and no access to anybody’s thoughts. It is the one thing in the film that a person could, in principle, go back and check. It is also mostly surface: a man in a hotel room declining to answer a question, filmed by someone too young to know what she has just asked him. When the grown Sophie watches the tapes, that surface is what she gets back, intact, with nothing underneath it. The rest of the film is an attempt to supply what the lens missed.

Calum has the camera sometimes too. In one scene he films Sophie asleep with the camcorder in night mode, which laid a lattice pattern over the picture. Wells has said that image was then re-shot on 35mm, so the grain of the film sits on top of the noise of the video.33Wells described this in an interview with The Playlist, as reported by No Film School. It is the most literal picture of memory in Aftersun: a record, photographed again, with a second layer of texture over the first. It also reverses the usual arrangement. For once, the person behind the camcorder is the one with something to hide.

There is a private layer here as well. Sophie’s camcorder is the same format as the camera Wells’s father gave her, and some of the film’s dialogue came from tapes he shot of her. The footage in Aftersun was staged, but Wells had spent time with the real thing first.

The tape is the film’s evidence. Most of what we see of Calum, though, was shot on 35mm, and that is where the film does its real thinking about him.

04Photography

Wells and Oke agreed early that a film about memory had to be shot on 35mm. Oke liked the way film renders colour and softens skin. The main camera was an ARRICAM LT with 400ft and 1,000ft magazines, framing at 1.85:1, and he budgeted about 4,000 feet of film a day. Wells told TheWrap that the guiding idea she shared with him was the sense of being back in a disconnected time, and most of the technical decisions can be read as ways of getting there.

Day exteriors were shot on Kodak VISION3 200T with an 81EF filter as a half-correction, to get a clean white but keep some warmth. Night and low-light scenes went on 500T. For lenses, Oke tested vintage ZEISS Standard Speeds and ARRI/ZEISS Ultra Primes before settling on Cooke S4s, because of the way the Cookes rendered faces. A half-correction is a fair description of the film’s whole attitude to the past. The white is clean, and the warmth is kept on purpose.

The Cookes were chosen for faces, and the film is full of them at close range, most of them Sophie’s. Her face in daylight, on 35mm, is the nearest thing the film has to certainty. It is what Sophie knows best: herself at eleven, looking at things.

The light follows the same split as the framing, which I’ll come to next. Scenes of father and daughter together were lit naturally, with the sun shaped by butterflies, overheads, flats and flags, and ARRI SkyPanels rigged above the windows for the hotel interiors. Calum’s scenes alone were pushed toward something more stylised, even theatrical.44For the night scenes the crew used 4K HMIs and hidden Titan Astra tubes.

The preparation was thorough. By Wells’s account the shot list took about an hour per page of script, and Oke put together a reference document on memory and point of view in film for the discussions before the shoot. The visual references ran from photographers such as Luigi Ghirri and Mary Frey to filmmakers such as Chantal Akerman and Hou Hsiao-hsien.55The full list, as Kodak reported it: the photographers Luigi Ghirri, Mary Frey, Silke Grossman and Sascha Weidner; the painters Kudzanai-Violet Hwami and Tom Anholt; the filmmakers Akerman, Denis, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Tsai Ming-liang and Apichatpong; and the experimental filmmakers Bruce Baillie and Jonas Mekas. Some images were found on the day anyway. The shot of Calum and Sophie reflected in a television screen came from where things happened to be placed in the room, and it isn’t in the script.

Covid travel limits meant the film was processed and scanned at Cinelab in Bucharest instead of at Kodak’s Pinewood lab, and Kath Raisch graded it at Company 3 in New York.

05Point of View

Oke has described the camera plan in plain terms. Sophie is seen from her own point of view, in close-ups, mid shots and reverses. Calum is seen at more of a distance, often in reflections or from behind, and from more disjointed angles. Wells has said they shot him at arm’s length, with wider lenses, through mirrors and glass. She has also said Oke has a habit of shooting people’s backs, and Aftersun gives that habit a reason.

The reason is in another of Wells’s remarks. She has described Calum’s scenes alone as partly imagined, coloured by what Sophie learned later. When Sophie is in the frame, the camera is close to her and sees roughly what she sees. When Calum is alone, we are watching something nobody recorded and no child witnessed, put together after the fact by the adult she became. Wells wanted him to feel physically solid, with his unravelling hidden from Sophie and visible to us. The framing is how she managed it. A reflection is a useful image for a man seen through someone else’s memory: accurate, and the wrong way round.

Mescal’s Oscar nomination was for a performance the camera often watches from behind or in a mirror. That is harder than it sounds, and he makes the back of his head do a great deal of work.

The method went further than the camera. Wells gave Corio a script with every scene she wasn’t in removed, so the actor playing Sophie made the film knowing roughly what Sophie knows.

Small things slip out at that distance. Calum cuts the cast off his wrist himself. He teaches Sophie how to free her wrists if someone grabs them, and later the two of them do tai chi together. The moments of grief the film lets us see are short, and they are enough to show the extent of what he is going through.

The scuba trip gives the film its plainest image of the distance. Sophie loses an expensive mask. Calum makes a grab for it and misses, and for a moment the camera takes the mask’s point of view as it sinks. Wells has said the failed grab stands for something he can never quite hold on to. He acts unbothered about the loss, but Sophie senses he is upset and comforts him, an eleven-year-old looking after her father.

06The Mirror Scene

On the same trip, talking with the diving instructor, Calum says the clearest thing he says all holiday: “I can’t see myself at 40, to be honest. Surprised I made it to 30.” He never answers Sophie’s question on the tape about what he imagined for himself. He comes closest with a stranger.

So we know early that he is struggling, but the film doesn’t show it plainly until Sophie starts to notice, and that tells us how hard he works to keep it away from her. Deflection is all he is really doing. He has his tai chi and his self-help books, but nearly everything he has goes into keeping Sophie as happy as she can be, and very little into healing himself.

That is why the bathroom scene is so heartbreaking. Calum is at the sink brushing his teeth, and Sophie, in the bedroom, tells him she feels a bit down. She tries to explain it: the way a lovely day can end with you worn out to the bones, heavy, as if you are sinking. Calum tells her they are here to have a good time. Then, where she can’t see him, he looks up and spits at his own reflection.66Details of the scene from Laura Zornosa’s essay on the film for TIME (March 2023) and from the published screenplay, whose wording of Sophie’s lines differs slightly from the finished film.

What Sophie is describing is something Calum knows all too well, and he condemns himself for it. The spit is disgust with himself, at the thought that whatever he has, he might have passed on to her. I read this as the moment Calum realises that what he lives with is most likely clinical depression, and genetic: something in him that his daughter may have inherited. The film never names a diagnosis, and this is my reading of it. It is the only way I can make sense of a man hearing his eleven-year-old describe his own feelings back to him and answering by spitting in his own face.77Zornosa reads the scene in much the same way, in an essay about the film and the depression that runs through her own family.

07The Karaoke Night

On the karaoke night, Sophie signs them both up for R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion”. Calum refuses, and she sings it alone while he watches. Lucy Bright, the music supervisor, suggests Sophie probably picked the song up from her dad, and Wells treated it as central to the film. If Bright is right, the girl on stage is singing her father’s song to him, by herself, because he wouldn’t get up.

Any time there is a group around them, Calum gets visibly uncomfortable. I don’t think it is embarrassment. He can barely keep up the front for Sophie, and he has nothing left to keep it up for a room full of strangers.

After the karaoke, Sophie stays out with the teenage tourists and kisses a boy named Michael (Brooklyn Toulson) by a pool. Calum walks alone down the beach and into the black sea, and Oke shot it in a more theatrical, dreamlike style. Sophie is elsewhere. She can’t have seen it and nobody filmed it, so if it is in the film at all, someone has had to imagine it.

When she gets back to the room she finds him asleep, naked, and covers him with a sheet. The next day they make up on the way to the mud baths, and Calum apologises. From the outside, that afternoon would make an ordinary holiday photograph. The night before would not be in it.

08Music

The rest of the soundtrack is 1999 as a resort would have played it: “Macarena”, “Tubthumping”, Catatonia’s “Road Rage”, Bran Van 3000’s “Drinking in L.A.”, All Saints’ “Never Ever”, Steps’ “5,6,7,8”. Songs are how a lot of people date their memories, and the film uses them that way. “Tender” is one of the ways we know the year.

Oliver Coates’s score is mostly cello, synth and sound design, including cello played through contact mics, and it has the same grain as the pictures. McClendon added one of the film’s best habits in the edit. He came up with letting dialogue flow into music, and first did it in the scene where father and daughter talk about the sky. Sophie tells him she thinks it’s nice that they share the same sky, and her words drift into the music. Memory treats conversation much the same way. The words go first and the tune stays.

10The Birthday

For Calum’s thirty-first birthday, Sophie gets a group of other tourists to sing to him. He watches them without reacting. It is a hard scene to sit through. The kindness is all hers, and he can’t take it in. It is another crowd, and he has nothing to give it.

Later he sobs alone on the hotel bed, filmed from behind. On the floor nearby is a postcard he has written to Sophie: “I love you very much. Never forget that.” This is where Oke’s habit of shooting backs costs the most. We can’t see Calum’s face, and Sophie isn’t in the room, so the film shows us the worst moment of the holiday from a position nobody occupied, close behind him and no help at all.

There is the rug, too. In a carpet shop Calum likes a rug, struggles with the price and walks away. Later he goes back alone and buys it. Keep the rug in mind.

And there is the Polaroid. Calum pays for a Polaroid of the two of them at a meal, and the film lets it develop on screen while Sophie asks why they can’t just stay in hotels forever. Wells has said the line was improvised. The Polaroid is the third kind of image in Aftersun, after the tape and the 35mm. It is a chemical picture that takes its time to appear, of a moment the two of them chose to keep. The tape moves and has sound; the Polaroid holds still and keeps only the two of them at the table. A photograph slowly arriving while a child asks to stay forever is as plain a statement of the film’s subject as Wells allows herself.

11The Ending

Wells has said the last forty minutes were almost unchanged from the first assembly cut, and that the ending always worked. It plays with that kind of confidence.

On the last night, father and daughter dance to “Under Pressure” at the resort’s outdoor disco. The scene cuts back and forth with the rave, where the grown Sophie reaches for Calum and briefly holds him before he slips away.

The song arrived by chance. Wells has said it was dropped in on a whim one night in the edit and lined up unexpectedly well with the dance. She and McClendon slowed it down and isolated the vocals, and Coates wrote music that weaves through it.88Clearing the song meant getting approval from two publishers and three master owners. Wells has called it a big swing. On the holiday it is a father dancing with his daughter on their last night. In the rave it is a grown woman holding on to a man who keeps slipping out of her arms, to the same two voices.

PAUSE

Then the airport. The last of the tape belongs to Calum, who films Sophie as she leaves. Then he puts the camcorder away, walks down an empty white corridor and opens the doors into the rave, and that is the last shot of the film. The doors between the white corridor and the dark room are the last thing we see him touch.

REC0:58:31JUL. 17 1999

Look at who holds the camera at each end. The film opens with Sophie filming Calum and asking him a question he won’t answer. It closes with Calum filming Sophie, then putting the camera away and walking out of the record altogether, into the one room nobody at the resort could have filmed. Wells keeps what became of him after the holiday off the screen. The ending tells us only where Sophie has to go to find him.

In the present-day scenes Sophie lives with her wife and a baby, and the rug Calum bought is on their floor, worn now. She has the tapes and she has the rug. The tapes play back exactly as they were recorded. The rug has been walked on for twenty years.

At eleven Sophie asked her father what he had imagined for himself, and he told her to stop filming. Twenty years later she is about the age he was then, and the 35mm is what she has made in place of his answer: a holiday photographed at a half-correction, clean enough to believe and warm enough to keep, with the hardest parts seen from behind.

The film ends with no answers, but with understanding on both sides. In that bathroom Calum saw what his daughter might one day carry, and twenty years on she is trying to see what he carried. It leaves us with the postcard and the last dance, and then with Calum falling out of her grasp in the strobe light. Nobody says what happened to him. I think we know.

It made me love and admire my own parents even more.