Aftersun: The Pinnacle of Film as a Haunted Medium
Aftersun, directed by Scottish newcomer Charlotte Wells, is a masterclass in texture. And that is something you don’t often associate with movies. What is it for a film to have texture? For me, it is when you are so immersed in the film that you can almost reach in and touch, feel, and breathe the world the characters inhabit. A breeze of fresh air in the film hits you; the environment, lush green or urban grey, invites you to walk in its world. A lot of things need to come into place to achieve this. And most films that do, place this atmosphere at the forefront, often ignoring a conventional plot for something more abstract. Aftersun doesn’t do this, however. The beating heart of this film is what it has to say and not how it says it. And yet, the way it conveys its simple and human story taps into something primal within us; it taps into the ever-shifting and fleeting nature of memories.
Most of the film takes place in a hotel in Turkey. Calum (Paul Mescal) and his 11-year-old daughter Sophie (Frankie Coro) are on vacation, and present-day adult Sophie recollects the trip through scrappy old footage taken on her camcorder. Whilst these clips portray reality in its honest form, the rest of the film, told through young Sophie’s POV, is bustling with colours and has a haze-like dreamy quality. Yes, these events were probably what exactly happened. But you can’t help but feel that these memories have been slightly altered, with Calum depicted as what she thought he was like, and not who he actually was. Memories change over time, after all. We tend to fill in the gaps and overwrite details. This brings me back to the ‘texture’ of the film. The colour palette is milky, soft, and saturated, making the film feel like a warm hug. The camera’s subjects are often decentralised, fragmented, and off-kilter. Calum and Sophie are given space to exist. The camera lingers on them, letting them soak in the silence, with only the sound of the ambience and their own breaths to accompany them. The entire film could’ve been composed of these moments and I still would’ve deeply enjoyed it. However, these small moments turn out to have a huge impact on the understanding of the film. It is only in the movie's later stages that you realise what it’s actually about and all the little things end up foreshadowing what will happen.
Calum, portrayed brilliantly by Paul Mescal (snubbed by the Oscars), is a man battling his personal demons. Beneath his pleasant visage and gentle smile, he is in agony. And he does his best to shield his daughter from that. In a scene where he removes the cast from his broken arm, there is a visual separation between him and his daughter. Sophie, in the living room illuminated with warm light by a lamp, and Calum, in the cold and dimly lit bathroom, on the verge of crying because of the pain. But he doesn’t; to not cause his daughter to panic. This is a perfect representation of their relationship. Calum tries to do his best to make the trip a memorable one for Sophie, and the duo definitely has fun. But there are moments where cracks show in Calum’s delightful facade. When his daughter tells him about how exhausted and down she feels, he feels ashamed and disgusted. Mescal, brushing his teeth, depicts these emotions with a silent rage simmering underneath. He spits his toothpaste at the mirror, at himself, feeling guilty about the depressive episodes that he might have passed on to his daughter.
These small moments all add up and explode in a crescendo towards the film’s oh-so-brilliant climax, elevating the film from a great one to a masterpiece that should/will be remembered for generations to come. Queen and David Bowie’s Under Pressure will forever be ingrained in my mind, and I’ll never be able to listen to it again without tearing up. The poetic ending is similar to that of another all-time favourite, Clare Denis’ magnum opus Beau Travail (1999).
Analysis
Hauntology
Cinema is inherently a ghostly medium. It manages to evoke worlds in a different space and time. The characters in a film are ghosts, in a way. They don’t really exist; they are different from the actors that portray them. And yet we always feel their presence, out of reach. One might say cinema is the most accurate reflection of reality since it utilizes visuals, dialogue, and sound to document entities, human and not. But ever since the inception of the relatively young art form, creative filmmakers have sought to push that envelope and started to convey something more abstract. Faith, memories, love, and grief were meditated upon. Whilst these themes are mostly explored through metaphors where certain characters, objects, or actions are supposed to represent something, some filmmakers tapped into this intrinsic haunted nature of movies and had a looming spectral aesthetic to their films. ‘Hauntology’ is a word used to describe such films, although it wasn’t invented as such. A portmanteau of ‘haunting’ and ‘ontology’, we can thank Jacques Derrida (of deconstructionism fame) for coining the term. But the term is often associated with a sub-genre of electronic music starting from the 2000s. Music artists like Burial and Boards of Canada incorporated a decayed and spectral quality to their sound to invoke a sense of nostalgia. Nostalgia for a time that perhaps never existed.
But when it comes to film, Alan Resnais’ Last Year At Marienbad (1961) is probably the best example. With its ever-shifting sense of time, location, and logic, it defies convention and all attempts to rationalise the film. Structured like a recurring dream, the film attempts to capture the complexity of memories and thoughts. It could even be a memory of a dream.
And then there’s Andrei Tarkovsky, whose entire filmography is tinged with the melancholic and aching sense of longing that is synonymous with hauntology. With atmospheres so thick that you can cut it with a knife, his films sometimes feature literal spectres, as in Solaris.
Aftersun: Haunted By The Living
Aftersun doesn’t place this aesthetic at its centre unlike the films discussed above. It is a powerful father-daughter drama that uses the fragmented nature of old memories to merely supplement its narrative, not supplant it. But nevertheless, the subtext of haze-like memories hangs all over the film. The posters allude to this fact, and the scrappy old footage scattered throughout the film also aligns with hauntology. But before we go further, we need to talk about what the film is actually about. So spoilers ahead (duh).
It is clear that Calum is suicidal and ends up killing himself after the events of the film. Numerous moments point towards this. The fact that he is reckless; going diving without a licence, walking carefree in front of a moving bus, standing on the railing of a balcony, and the most obvious hint: Him walking into the ocean at night with his clothes on. Despite having minor money troubles, he decides to buy an expensive rug as a family heirloom for his daughter. At this point, he probably knew that this trip would be his last seeing her. Sophie herself is very perceptive and mature. She loses her goggles while diving and apologises to her father, acknowledging that it was expensive. Throughout the trip, there are some weird traces of tension between them. It isn’t your usual ‘I actually hate you dad mwaaaahh’ kind of conflict. It is Sophie realising that her dad isn’t completely who she thought he was. That he is not invincible and that he, too, is vulnerable to anguish and silent suffering. This is not at all obvious in the first watch. But once you know the context after the incredible ending, we start to piece things together. The tension itself is ghost-like.
One pivotal point in the film is when Sophie asks her dad about his 11th birthday and films it through the camcorder. We see it through the footage. Calum is distraught and dodges the question, implying a fraught childhood. He gets irked and asks her to stop recording. When this recording of the ‘interview’ is played on the television in their room, Calum makes her turn it off; then, you can see his hazy and distorted reflection on the black screen of the TV. And a small proper reflection on a mirror in the corner.
This might be the most important frame in the movie (The ending gains its strength as a whole sequence). The blurred line between reality and memory is perfectly captured here. It is here that we realise that these scenes are recollections from adult Sophie. Calum’s image is not clearly visible, just like how her memories of him are mangled. There are quite a few shots like these in the film, with Calum and Sophie visible only through the reflections on objects. Reflection and introspection are major themes in the movie, after all. But the film’s greatest weapon to hammer home its message is the abstract nightclub dance floor.
The film opens in darkness, and strobe lights join the fray. We are able to make out a face in the rave, a woman’s. We come to know that this is adult Sophie. Initially, she is barely visible, only for fleeting moments. But as the film progresses, these cryptic rave sequences (which are interspersed throughout the film) get more and more clear. We later learn who she is staring at: Her father, the same age he was during the trip. This suggests that this was the last she saw of him. In the surreal rave, Calum is wildly flaying around in a dance. He is clearly uncomfortable. In the resort, alone in his room, Calum sobs uncontrollably. The camera pans to a postcard addressed to Edinburgh for Sophie. He tells her that he’ll always love her. By this point, the viewers will realise this is probably his suicide note.
And coming to the mesmerizing ending, Callum takes his daughter to dance on the last night of the trip. This dance in Turkey is juxtaposed with the rave sequence, and a version of Under Pressure plays throughout. Now, both Sophie and Calum are visible, although the lights still violently flicker. She screams at him, desperately trying to hold and stop him from manically dancing. Meanwhile, in the resort, 11-year-old Sophie is embarrassed and tries to push him away. And finally, adult Sophie manages to calm him down and embrace him in the rave. And the young daughter also gives in and hugs her father. The flickering adult Sophie morphs into the younger one, and the sequence ends. Her memories fuse into her current-day recollection of the events. She realises that while her father was joyous on the outside during the dance, inside, he was in a dark room with his senses getting stabbed.
We see the old footage again; of Sophie leaving Calum at the airport to return to her mother. It is Calum recording this, of course, and the film ends with him closing the camcorder and heading back through the empty hallway into the dark room in the rave sequences. This is the last time Sophie sees him. From then on, he lives only in her memories. As a ghost.
The ending is pure poetry, and David Bowie’s last lines in Under Pressure sum it up:
This is our last dance / This is our last dance / This is ourselves
