Our worlds are puzzles with pieces gone. Every moment we feel, every person we love, is incomplete. We see, but not all sides.
It’s the 1990s, and Sophie is turning 11. Her dad is nearly 31. And to celebrate their birthdays, the two go on holiday—a glorious, unforgettable, once-in-a-lifetime trip to Turkey.
And what a time it is. Sophie feels the Mediterranean sun prickle her skin—more joyous, more fierce than in her native Scotland. It dances on crayon-blue water, warm and welcoming. She watches teens canoodle at the resort. She meets a boy her own age.
Above and around and under it all is Sophie’s father, Calum—filled with goofy dance moves and outing plans and love. So much love. And Sophie, being 11, sees and hears and experiences it all as only an 11-year-old can—unfiltered, unadulterated, pure as the Turkish water, fierce as the Turkish sun. She’s filled with life like a water balloon. She glows with it like a lantern.
But when Sophie’s not looking, her father’s smile stops. His eyes grow distant. Sometimes, he’s not quite … there.
Sophie feels inklings of her father’s angst, what’s roiling and churning under Calum’s sunny smile. He sometimes seems to grow upset (at her?), to get stuck somewhere. In a land of sun and beauty, a cloud sometimes seems to gather ‘round Calum’s brow, dark and thunderous.
But then it passes, and Calum’s smile returns. All is as it should be on this holiday. A holiday so beautiful.
And then …
Sophie is turning 31. Her dad is … on old videos kept for 20 years. She watches them now, then rewatches them. She freezes on Calum’s face, searching, searching.
She’s looking for pieces of her father.
Pieces she missed long ago—lost in the sun, in the blue water.
If you do the math, you know that Calum had Sophie when he was quite young—not even 20 when his little girl was born. (He’s sometimes mistaken for being Sophie’s brother.) You might assume that Calum might’ve been a disinterested father, given his youth. But this film suggests the contrary. Indeed, at times it would seem that Calum’s only interest is in Sophie—giving her the encouragement he thinks she should have and the education he thinks she needs. And though Calum split up with Sophie’s mom some time ago, and Sophie now lives with her, Calum’s doing his best to make those precious moments with his daughter count.
Calum asks about school, quizzing her about her new teacher. He begins teaching her a few tips in self-defense. He encourages her to step out of her safety zone. And when Calum’s mistakenly given a hotel room with just one bed, he allows Sophie to have it, while he sleeps on a tiny cot beside her. He’s determined to give his daughter a safe sounding board.
“You can talk to me about anything,” he tells Sophie, casting his eyes to their future. “Boys you meet, drugs you take. … Promise me that you’ll talk to me about any of it.”
“I’m never going to do any of it,” Sophie tells Calum.
“That’s OK, too!” Calum tells her. “But if you do, remember, OK?”
But while Calum seems sincere in his desire to be a good dad, he can get in his own way sometimes. Sophie sees his struggles at the edges, and she perhaps tries to encourage him in her own 11-year-old way. When he passes out in the hotel room and accidentally locks Sophie out, she doesn’t pass judgment the next day. When he officially turns 31, Sophie encourages other tourists to sing “He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” to him. Calum and Sophie have moments of friction during their holiday, and both make some unfortunate decisions (as we’ll see). But their shared love is not up for debate.
Calum practices Tai Chi frequently, and at one juncture he encourages Sophie to join him. He’s brought along books about both Tai Chi and meditation, and you get the sense that he’s leaning into both spiritual disciplines in an effort to master his mind and emotions.
Sophie sings REM’s “Losing My Religion” during a karaoke session.
As is the case with many an 11-year-old, Sophie is beginning to think about sex and romance—and the Turkish resort gives her plenty of exposure to both.
She peeps through a keyhole and watches as a girl talks about committing a sex act with a boy (using hand gestures to indicate the act itself). After she’s befriended by a group of teens, Sophie watches as a teen boy and girl make out by the side of a pool, as their friends playfully debate what their relationship actually is. One teen convinces Sophie to help push the two into the pool; the rest then dive in with their clothes on, and Sophie eyes another couple as they kiss under water. (The woman’s wet, white blouse reveals a black bra underneath.) She also spies two young men kissing.
Sophie closely watches boys, girls, men and women whom she finds attractive (some of whom are in bathing suits), and she’s considering her own femininity as well. (She wears a spaghetti-strapped dress over her modest bikini when she and her father go out to dinner—an outfit not entirely to Calum’s approval.) She apparently buys a plastic bauble depicting a naked female. And she strikes up a friendship with a boy her own age, too. The pair primarily compete in video-game races (the camera focuses on how close their elbows get as they ride their plastic motorcycles and stare at the screen), but they eventually share a kiss late one night by a pool, most of which the camera turns away from.
The next morning, Sophie tells her father about the kiss. He makes sure that it was a boy her own age and hopefully suggests it was a peck on the cheek. (Sophie can say yes to the former but no to the latter.)
Casting forward into the future, Sophie has a wife of her own, and a baby as well (which we hear more than we see). Sophie and her spouse share a bed, and when Sophie gets up to take care of their baby, her partner’s nipples are visible through her nightgown.
When Calum passes out in his and Sophie’s bedroom, he’s naked—his bare rear exposed to the camera in shadow. When Sophie gains admittance to the room (courtesy a hotel clerk), she swiftly covers her father with a sheet. In a flashback to that same evening, we see Calum weeping in the nude—though we see nothing critical.
Calum and Sophie talk about a one-time serious girlfriend of his. He also admits that he thinks Sophie’s new schoolteacher is attractive.
When we first meet Calum, he bears a cast on his wrist. He doesn’t remember how he broke his wrist, he admits to Sophie, and he cuts the cast off himself about midway through the film, trying to slice through the plaster with a small pair of scissors. He may injure himself, but it’s hard to tell—sitting in a dark bathroom with his arm hanging over a bucket of water. We hear liquid drip into the bucket, but whether it’s water from the damp cast, or blood, or both, we can’t say.
Sophie notices that Calum’s shoulder is hurt, too. Elsewhere, he walks in front of a moving bus, apparently not noticing or not caring whether it hits him. He balances on the top of a balcony railing—a nifty visual metaphor for Calum’s life at that moment.
As mentioned, Calum teaches his daughter some rudimentary self-defense lessons—specifically how to yank her wrists free from someone grabbing them. (The lessons themselves, she mentions to her father, are rather painful.) When a boy grabs Sophie from behind as a joke, she swiftly puts her lessons into play—knocking the kid down.
While this isn’t violent, exactly, Aftersun is interlaced with scenes from a rave—a strobe light occasionally illuminating Calum, an adult Sophie, and even the child Sophie a time or two. It seems as though the adult Sophie is trying to reach her father through the dark, jagged chaos. And at times, the scenes we see can look like those of a physical struggle.
[Spoiler Warning] While the movie never tells us outright what happened to Calum, every beat of the story suggests that he died shortly after his and Sophie’s vacation—and through his own self-destructive impulses.
At least three f-words, two uses of the word “p-ss” (in a background song) and a handful misuses of God’s name.
Sophie holds a very dim view of smoking, alleging it causes everything from cancer to making “your eyeballs to fall out.” But Calum smokes secretly—sneaking out to the hotel balcony on the first night to light up. Later, he picks up a still burning cigarette from the street and takes to puffing.
Calum drinks, too, consuming at least three beers one evening and inviting Sophie to take a sip as the two play chess. He drinks elsewhere. One night he consumes so much that he passes out in his and Sophie’s hotel room; when she hammers on the door, he doesn’t hear, and Sophie’s forced to sleep for a while in the lobby until a hotel worker lets her in.
Sophie looks on as several teens drink both shots and beer.
Calum is a loving parent, but the example he sets can sometimes be lacking. He and Sophie hurl dinner rolls at some hotel performers before they both run away. He encourages Sophie to make fun of a tour guide. And he allows Sophie to hang out with some much older kids—unable or unwilling to say no to her, apparently.
[Spoiler Warning] One night, Sophie signs her (increasingly despondent) father and herself up for a karaoke song. Calum flatly refuses to do it, leaving Sophie to sing alone. When the song’s done, Calum suggests that the two turn in for the night, but 11-year-old Sophie flatly refuses to go with her dad, so Calum goes back to the hotel room by himself—telling Sophie to not stay up too late. It’s during this night that Sophie watches her teen friends drink and shares her first kiss with a boy after she gets lost on the resort grounds. Meanwhile, Calum leaves the hotel room to swim in the ocean—ultimately returning to fall naked and unconscious on Sophie’s bed. The next day, he apologizes profusely to Sophie, who tells her pops that it was no big deal.
“When you were 11, what did you think you would be doing now?”
Sophie asks the question innocently, filming Calum with the camcorder they brought along for the trip. In the video, we see Calum’s shadowed face freeze, the simple question triggering a complex storm. He tells Sophie to turn off the camcorder.
But while Sophie complies, the Aftersun movie camera does no such thing. In one lingering shot, we see two Calums—one reflected in the curve of a gray TV screen, while another lingers in the left-hand side of the frame, the living image boxed in by the books he himself brought: Tai Chi by Paul Leonard; How to Meditate by Billur Turan; Being Aware of Being Aware by Rupert Spira. Both versions of Callum stare away from Sophie and to a point on the wall—hiding his pain.
That’s the breaking power of Aftersun—a movie in which, on the surface, not much happens: A dad and daughter go on vacation. Write out the whole plot, and it’d not take up much more than a page or two.
But imagine someone taking those pages and wadding them up into tight balls, then smoothing them out. Aftersun’s real story is told in the folds.
The movie has some content issues: the language, the sexual content, a complex and imperfect father-daughter dynamic. But as R-rated movies go, this feels relatively less content-laden than most.
Still, it is, in its own way, quietly devastating.
Paul Mescal earned an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of Calum, and it’s well earned. While we’ve seen plenty of broken people on screen, dealing with every stripe of mental illness, rarely has it been depicted with such honesty and nuance. We can see him suffer. We can see him so desperately try to hide that suffering from his daughter to give her a beautiful trip. Perhaps, one last memory.
Aftersun scratches at the scab of relationship, hitting a truth rarely spoken: How much we lie to each other to craft those beautiful memories. And perhaps, how much we lie to ourselves to accept them.
And yet, in the midst of those deceptions—the pretense that we’re feeling just fine when we’re not, that the argument we had didn’t hurt that bad—can unfurl into moments of unexpected, beautiful and unalloyed truth. Where the complexities of life and relationship are burned down to bare, wonderful essence: a dad, a daughter, a dance they share.
Our worlds are puzzles with pieces gone. But sometimes—in stark, sudden flashes—the picture coalesces. We see past the flaws and secrets and pain and see the love behind, above, around it all.
And our worlds, at least for a brief moment, feel whole.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
