Saturday, March 4, 2023

Aftersun (2022)

IMDb plot summary: Sophie reflects on the shared joy and private melancholy of a holiday she took with her father twenty years earlier. Memories real and imagined fill the gaps between as she tries to reconcile the father she knew with the man she didn't...
Directed by Charlotte Wells. Starring Paul Mescal, Frankie Corio, and Celia Rowlson-Hall.

Aftersun follows a vacation a young girl takes with her father, frequently told through her videotaped footage of their time together. I don't want to give away too many more details of their story, though most of the film's plotlines are hinted at long before they're ever confirmed. This movie was a slow burn for me, so slow that I genuinely didn't realize until the end how much I had been pulled into it. And then suddenly the credits rolled and I found I wanted to cry, and it took me a full day or so to unpack how much it had affected me emotionally. There's such combined love and sadness in this movie, and the two are all wrapped up in each other in a way that makes the final scenes just heartbreaking. I'm glad to see Paul Mescal getting the award attention he deserves for this role, because he really brings it all home. I don't know that this is one I can imagine watching again, given how hard it hit me emotionally the first time around, but it's really a masterful piece of work.

How it entered my Flickchart:
Aftersun > Dazed and Confused
Aftersun > Safe
Aftersun > The White Tiger
Aftersun < Deathtrap
Aftersun > Shaolin Soccer
Aftersun < I'm Not Scared
Aftersun < The City of Lost Children
Aftersun > Nosferatu
Aftersun < Shattered Glass
Aftersun > Searching for Bobby Fischer
Aftersun < Bells Are Ringing
Aftersun > Fail-Safe (1964)
Final spot: #332 out of 3764, or 91%.

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