Aftersun – 2022
The title itself provokes such contemplation and fascination. It leads us to muse upon the film’s themes, but also seems to hint at the way this film impacts us.
Aftersun lotion brings coolness and hydration to sun-exposed skin.
In Charlotte Wells’s film, Sophie is looking back from her adult years on a trip she took with her father when she was eleven years old. She enjoyed the trip and her father at the time, but the passing years seem to have brought pain into alignment with these memories. We can understand from the film’s structure that Sophie is looking back in two ways. She is viewing home video reels that were taken during that trip, but it seems she is also filling in the gaps between the reels with her own memories.
We can speculate on the ways Sophie herself has been wounded. Perhaps these wounds come from what has happened to her father in the years that have passed. Perhaps they come from how her relationship with her father has become so distant that she can now only interact with him through memory. Either way we intuit that she has been burned. What will be her aftersun? What will cool the burns that have imprinted themselves on her memory? Maybe her aftersun will be the filmed documents of this trip. Maybe it will be the memories themselves. Maybe it will be those around her. Maybe God. The movie invites us to consider what makes for the healing of a wounded soul.
Aftersun lotion brings coolness and hydration to sun-exposed skin.
We ourselves watch the film, and as we watch we take home visual and aural details we can contemplate. We take home the detail of mud being slathered over bodies at an ancient city. The detail of hang gliders grazing the sky above. The detail of water everywhere. The detail of the clicks and whirs of the home video camera. We also hear words spoken between Sophie and her Dad. We hear Sophie describe a seahorse wrapped around her finger. We take these home too, and they may even make their home in our own memory playback for some days. These visual details and words are evocative, but the first time we see and hear them they may deflect off us and not leave a mark.
This is the sort of movie that doesn’t force anything on us, but rather lays down these details delicately. Director Wells is like a featherworker threading the needle through each feather’s quill and then fastening them to the collage one by one.
On repeat viewings, or in our playback memories, these details will likely pass from being thoughts we take home with us to things that take up residence in our hearts. These details may ultimately burn us, but they also may soothe us as the aftersun lotion soothes a skin burn. In this way, the title evokes the space this film occupies in relation to us filmgoers. It is a thing outside of us at first, then later comes in close the more time we spend with it.
At one early point in the film’s trip, Sophie shares with her Dad a thought that brings her peace. She says, “I think it’s nice that we share the same sky.” He asks her what she means. She then goes on to explain, “Well, like, sometimes at playtime, I look up to the sky, and if I can see the sun then I think about the fact that we can both see the sun. So even if we’re not actually in the same place and we’re not actually together, we kind of are in a way, you know? Like, we’re both underneath the same sky, we’re kind of together.”
The above explanation refers to the fact that Sophie’s Dad is divorced from her Mom and that Sophie lives most of the time distant from her Dad while she is in her mother’s home. The sun then, can burn but it can also spark the imagination of togetherness with loved ones who are far from us. By film’s end it is not clear whether the sun will still remind Sophie that her father shares the same sky with her. At the very least, though, the title gives us hope that Sophie may just find an aftersun to soothe the pain.
