Decoding Aftersun

The following article contains spoilers.

Aftersun is about a woman reflecting on a vacation she had with her father decades ago when she was 11 years old. There's clearly joy and love in their connection but there’s also slight tension building up which stems from her dad’s mental health issues that he’s quietly dealing with. By the end, this very languid film becomes deeply painful as we learn that this vacation was the last time the two ever saw each other. It’s implied that Calum (played by Paul Mescal) committed suicide after leaving this vacation, leaving his daughter  Sophie (played by Frankie Corio) with only memories and video footage to pour over and piece together who he was and what she couldn’t see in him before. Here, I break down certain elements of the film.

Calum's mental health

Calum has been quietly dealing with depression throughout their vacation. Moments in the beginning, when he quietly glides out the back door for a cigarette while Sophie is sleeping and dances, ends up painting a portrait of a man attempting to relax. The same goes for the father's interest in Tai Chi. We can see that he's bought several books on it and practices often. Sophie thinks that he's doing his weird Ninja moves, which speaks to the separation that exists between whom Sophie thought she was looking at and whom she was really looking at.

Calum's mental health is half sketched but I think that's intentional. We get some clues as to why he must be feeling this way, but still, we never fully understand it. We are only given as many clues as Sophie has, which makes sense considering that this entire movie is from her perspective, but also because sometimes mental illness and depression don't always have a clear source. But here's what we do see in Calum – that he's a 31-year-old whose life has clearly not gone according to plan. Even the fact that he became a father to Sophie at 20 years old implies a burden he hadn’t always envisioned carrying. We learn that he's not together with Sophie's mother and that he struggles financially, which is something that clearly brings him shame and guilt. We see how he beats himself up over not being able to buy a rug or when Sophie loses a pair of expensive goggles. He appears to spiral mentally in these moments. At one point, Sophie asks him where he thought he'd be when he was 11 and it's something he almost doesn't want to answer. At 11, Calum probably felt like the entire world was in front of him, and now, at age 31, he's a financially struggling, separated parent of his own eleven-year-old.

Split Realities

Aftersun is very insightful about how the characters' respective ages play into the different realities that they’re navigating. At the movie's beginning, Sophie jokes that her dad is turning 130, but beneath this joke is the feeling that thirty-one feels so far away to an eleven-year-old. Sophie is in the middle of her own coming-of-age journey on this vacation, but in contrast, Calum doesn't even know how he made it to 30. Sophie is almost at her beginning, and Calum feels like he’s approaching a dead end in his life. He feels lost in time, which is why birthdays are so exciting to Sophie but so painful to Calum. At the end of the movie, Sophie thinks that he would probably like it if she got everyone to sing happy birthday to him, but Calum just seems haunted by this moment. When you’re eleven, every age feels like a new chapter in your life, but at a certain point, age can become a scary number. Calum tells Sophie that she can be whatever she wants to be, and I think he says this almost enviously, feeling like he no longer has time on his side. This is why it also becomes significant that Sophie, in the present day, looking back at these memories, is now the same age as her father and is also a parent. Perhaps from the perspective of her being older, she understands more about him and empathises with his experience in a way that she just wasn’t capable of doing when she was 11. The dark lighting in Sophie’s present-day apartment implies that she has probably been to very dark places in her life; no doubt her dad leaving was one of them, and now she has a greater understanding of what he was going through.

Much of Aftersun details how Sophie and Calum are having opposite internal experiences at this resort, despite spending most of the time together. Sophie thinks that it’s nice that everyone shares the same sky, and much of Aftersun involves the two staring at the sky or playing in the blue water. The blue of the sky and sea often bleed together visually, and occasionally the film transitions seamlessly from shots of the sky to shots of the sea (or the pool). The blue of the water represents something different to each of these characters. To Sophie, water is beautiful and brightly glistening, which represents possibility and dreams. From underwater, she gazes at the teens in the resort, imagining her future. Sophie admires the older kids and looks forward to being a teenager. The older kids also have an all-inclusive band that lets them get things for free, which is something that her dad certainly can’t afford for them, and the fact that that’s associated with teenagers simply has to do with Sophie’s vision of the future. The possibility that she could have this all-access pass. To Calum, however, the water is dark, menacing, and bottomless. When Sophie loses her goggles in the ocean, it is a financial blow. He just sits there, sad, watching the goggles fall into the dark sea. And there’s that moment in the end when Calum wanders into the ocean at night when his mental health problems hit a peak and the blackness of the sea engulfs him. The fact that the water meant two different things to these two characters in this film also speaks to how subjective experiences of the world can be so vastly different.

A daughter's love for her father

At eleven, Sophie’s at an age where she’s starting to develop more emotional perceptiveness. She’s starting to take a deeper interest in relationships and the people around her. Frankie Corio brilliantly brings that maturity but also that silliness that an eleven-year-old has. It’s just as much about her trying to understand her father at age 11 as it is about her trying to understand her father at age 31. She is always asking him questions that he always doesn’t want to answer and she can tell when something’s off. When she loses her goggles and her dad is quietly upset about it, she leans on him and says, "I know they were expensive," and he is almost surprised that she noticed. This gesture shows she is aware that he has economic problems, and she doesn’t want to be kept from knowing these things just because she’s a kid.

There’s also a moment when she gestures to him that she knows he smokes, which is something that he doesn’t want to tell her. She puts sheets on Calum after he is passed out after his spiral at night, which is similar to a shot in the beginning of the film where Calum tucks Sophie in at night and goes out for a smoke. Sophie feels like she is capable of taking care of her dad in the same way that he is capable of taking care of her, and when Calum apologises for a rough night, she doesn’t really say anything and continues to rub clay on him, which comes across as a sign of her trying to forgive and comfort him. She asks him where he got the marks on his shoulder, and he doesn’t answer. She is more than ready to listen if it cracks the portrait of the perfect, happy dad that Calum wants to paint. He tells her that she can tell him about anything—boys, drugs, etc.—but what’s tragic is that Calum won’t reciprocate that same openness that he is asking of Sophie. In a beautiful scene Calum is taking his cast off quietly in pain, cuts himself, and is bleeding while Sophie is on the other side of the wall just picking his brain and asking him about his relationship with her mother, and while he's giving her some answers, he's hiding something more painful. The cast in general, I think, is a symbol of him having an injury. The composition of the scene is a brilliant contrast of warm and cold lighting, and the wall acts as a barrier. The shot illustrates the rift between these two characters and Calum’s failure to allow them to fully connect, as well as their vastly different emotional states on this vacation. There’s one scene where Calum does reveal something sad about his life: on his eleventh birthday, his family forgot his birthday, which maybe indicates that he had a poor support system or an uncaring family, which may have contributed to his mental health. This piece of information is important because it shows how hard Calum is trying to be a good dad to Sophie. And yet the devastating realisation at the end of Aftersun is that sometimes love is not enough, especially in the face of mental illness and depression. And I’m sure that looking back, Sophie is trying the best she can to be grateful and hold on to the genuine love and guidance her father gave her, despite the fact that she may have trouble forgiving him for leaving.

The soundtrack

A lot of communication in Aftersun is indirect. Characters don’t always say what they’re thinking, but one way that director Charlotte Wells communicates what's going on underneath the surface is through music. Many of the song choices register as significant. "Tender" by Blur seems like the soundtrack to Calum’s mind, which is about someone who wants to get through the demons in their life to reach this great feeling of love. And R.E.M.’s "Losing My Religion" shows up at a meaningful moment when Sophie sings it during karaoke alone as Calum watches her and refuses to join her because he just can’t bring himself to do it.

That's me in the corner

That's me in the spot-light

Losing my religion

Trying to keep up with you

And I don't know if I can do it

Oh no I've said too much

I haven't said enough

The song is about someone romanticising someone who never wanted them back, but in this context, it’s about Sophie not being able to reach her dad. Finally, the use of Queen and David Bowie's "Under Pressure" as the soundtrack provides the film's climactic moment. The refrain of being "under pressure" itself speaks to the tension building in this relationship and the pain stewing inside her dad. The lyrics of the songs speak to the pain of that moment and the realisation that love wasn’t enough.

This is our last dance

This is our last dance

This is ourselves under pressure

Under pressure

Under pressure

Pressure

As the line "this is our last dance" comes up in the film, the audience slowly realises that this is the last time Calum and Sophie see each other. It destroys you. But in a way, it’s not really their last dance because it will continue forever inside Sophie’s.

The flashing rave

In the final moments of Aftersun, the movie bursts into a collage between the past and the present and the space in which Calum exists in Sophie’s mind, which is presented as this strobing, pitch-black rave. This space is meant to be abstract and to speak on a more visceral level. I think strobing resonates because Sophie may feel like, in her memory, her dad seems to come back in these flashes, and then he’s just gone. The blackness of this space in between feels like an endless void or even death. She remembers him for his goofy dance moves; throughout the film, she remembers the moments when Calum would dance and look truly free and happy. His physical movements, whether dancing or Tai Chi, seem to bring him calm.

But this space in Sophie’s mind also allows us to see how she interacts with him in her mind in the present day. Sometimes she screams at him, shoves him, or wrestles him, capturing her rage at him for not letting her be there for him, and other times she appears to be clinging to him the same way she did before, trying to grab hold of that love that he did have. Other times, it’s a combination of both. The choreography between the two feels like a tug of war between all the conflicting feelings that she did have for her father. And all the while, Calum looks almost unresponsive to anything that she does, almost like he can’t interact with her because he’s dead. This goes to show you how, even decades later, Sophie is trying to navigate her relationship with her father, even though he’s not here anymore.

The ending beautifully shows you how our relationship with the past and the people who are gone from our lives is always evolving, and when somebody passes, our memories of them become significant in a way that we could never anticipate. It leaves you searching and pouring through your own memories, looking to recontextualize those moments and prescribe meaning to things that may not have had meaning before because those memories are all that we have of them. What I find really magical about watching this movie is how, after it ends and the viewer learns what was bubbling inside the film, you, like the character, revisit these moments and try to make sense of them. In the final moment, the camera pans 180 degrees from adult Sophie to Calum right after Sophie says goodbye to him at the airport. The two characters almost feel as if they are looking at each other through time. He then puts his camera down and walks into the darkness, making you wonder what he took back from all this and what he was recording all this time. It also signals the exact time after which her dad started being nothing but a memory in her mind and on videotape.