Aftersun Review

Wells builds the film out of an eleven year old's holiday footage and the memory of an adult who is now roughly the age her father was, and the gap between those two vantage points is the entire picture. Almost nothing is stated. Calum's depression is conveyed by a plaster cast he will not explain, a tai chi routine performed alone at night, a self-help book, a debt he keeps deflecting, and one long shot of a man weeping on a bed that the camera holds without comment.

Paul Mescal plays him as someone performing lightness for an audience of one and steadily running out of energy for it. Frankie Corio is astonishing and entirely unmannered, which is what makes the karaoke scene unbearable. Gregory Oke shoots the resort as flat, ugly, overexposed and lovely all at once. The rave sequences that break the naturalism are the one element that reads as authored rather than remembered, and they divide people for good reason. The final handover of the camera at the airport is as devastating an ending as anyone managed this decade.