on vacation you don’t escape torments, you just try to turn them off

Rewrite this contentThe one that little Sophie and her father Calum spend in Turkey is not a terrible vacation, in fact, it is almost the opposite. It is both, depending on the moment and the perspective from which you look at it. It is a vacation that does reflect something: there are things from which it is not easy to run away, from which one does not run away. And yet, it is…A minimalist film only in appearance, After sun it is deceptively simple. Its great echoes are emotional, its impact beautifully deep, sensitive and harshly melancholic. In this father-daughter walk we see several layers revealed, those of our own memories, those of our own moments of recreation diluted in reality.Frankie Corio is Sophie in Charlotte Wells’ ‘Aftersun.’ – Photo: Sarah Makharine / MUBIA rug that tells a story, a rug that will unite two generations separated by life and its harshest corners. Paul Mescal is Calum Patterson, and for that tough role he was nominated for Best Actor at the 2023 Oscars. – Photo: Sarah Makharine / MUBIIn it, first-time director Charlotte Wells asks her audience to connect some emotional dots. They are trapped in the simple story of this vacation inspired (in part, not totally) by one that she herself lived as a child, with her father, in the nineties. Scottish, Wells subtly demands to go further than the surface. And she achieves it thanks to how she weaves her story and the performances that support it, of individual merit and of undoubted chemistry between the two, which reflects a complex bond, which is blood, which is family and which is more than that.“Why is it so strange, Dad, sometimes,” little Sophie (Frankie Corio) wonders about her father Calum (Paul Mescal), whom she sees from afar, doing tai chi movements. Most of the time he’s looking out for her, and the time they spend together isn’t one that bores her because they have a good time (she’s taught him to play billiards skillfully in the past, you can tell), but as the years go by, days he is feeling the fragile balance that comes with him, that accompanies him and that he struggles to keep at bay.Paul Mescal is Calum and Frankie Corio is Sophie, they are father and daughter in Charlotte Wells’ ‘Aftersun’. – Photo: Sarah Makharine / MUBIWithout knowing it, she is feeling that she also shares some of that fragility. But she allows herself to be the playful girl, that she asks, curious about what young people older than her are doing, wanting to be a little older to be part of it. And Sophie is not afraid to sing in front of more people a song that she likes, even if it is out of tune. (Losing My Religion from REM), even if her father, in that night of rancid attitude, preferred to leave her alone in the ritual they used to do together.At certain moments Calum’s gaze is lost in a deep place that he cannot explain to the little girl, he can barely explain it to himself, he barely survives it… He goes to his breathing exercises, to one or another cigarette when she has already fallen asleep.And everything, almost everything, is immortalized through a video camera 8. The texture of that 90s video record is part of this story.There’s undeniable chemistry and love between the Pattersons, but there’s something they’re not quite ready to share yet. – Photo: Sarah Makharine / MUBIThe father tries to control what overwhelms him and the girl, between the cracks of the sun and the good times, receives a bit of the voltage of an adult who carries the weight of her existence. Sophie is alert, intelligent; she is also a being who at a young age, with metaphorical clarity, describes the emptiness, the tiredness associated with depression. Envisioning her past and her future. Sharing something unknowingly. And upon hearing it, her father can’t help but react, “we came to have a good time,” she says, also trying to convince herself.No one can blame Sophie for not going along with her father even in tai chi exercises that sometimes make her look like a weirdo. – Photo: Sarah Makharine / MUBIWhen the holidays are over, Sophie returns home to Edinburgh, where she lives with her mother, where her father does not live. Calum explained why she during the trip: she never felt at home there. We don’t see her after saying goodbye to him, playful and with great affection, before boarding the flight. And he records it. Now, we see her again as an adult. Her experiencing things that she did not understand before, feeling emptiness that she can now understand better, without that making her existence easier.The film, which recently landed on MUBI Latin America, has enamored critics wherever it has premiered and will resonate in awards season (Paul Mescal was nominated for an Oscar). There is no need to take a look at this experience that from a vacation poses an existential generational X-ray.In her first film, Charlotte Wells managed to redefine vacation memories for several generations. – Photo: Emma McIntyre _ GETTY ImagesThe nineties mark, permeate; and if Blur’s music starts out festive and then becomes a bit distorted, it’s because this memory that seemed only joyful acquires other readings over time, looking at it from the future. Sophie is an adult too, Sophie looks back. She connects. She remembers the man who tried to teach her to protect herself from her, also the one who, out of beers, leaves her singing karaoke alone and then criticizes her singing.Unforgettable, sweet and shrewd, the little girl processes from her adult lens that memory of those days in the three-star hotel in Turkey. The memory from a more informed prism, the reading of small moments. and a version of Under Pressure of Queen and David Bowie that goes very deep. Time and a particularly intense dance floor reveal that she and her father try to weather the same torments.*Now available on MUBI.After sun – Photo: THE BAD and and more content about on vacation you don’t escape torments, you just try to turn them off