OCTOBER 21, 2022 , Vanityfair.com
Writer-director Charlotte Wells is watching audiences take many different paths to the same conclusion of her extraordinary film: “It feels in some strange way I’ve created a choose your own adventure.”
It’s not easy to explain the beauty of Aftersun—even, as it turns out, for the film’s director. “It’s hard to give an impression of what it is very concisely,” Charlotte Wells says of her feature debut, which casts Normal People breakout Paul Mescal as a young father on vacation with his 11-year-old daughter (played by Frankie Corio).
The Cannes sensation, out this week from A24, is deceptively complex. Told largely through the eyes of adult Sophie, whom we see observing her dad in a sort of metaphysical rave, Aftersun is about a child sorting through her memories to unpack the buried sorrow of her own parent. Those recollections can be both sun-dappled and quietly painful.
When Wells, originally from Scotland, initially started thinking about what would become Aftersun as she was finishing up her graduate program at New York University, it was a much more traditional narrative. “Over the course of writing it, I think I allowed memories and anecdotes from childhood to form a skeleton outline,” she says. “The more I spent thinking about memories and anecdotes from childhood, the more the process of thinking about them wove itself into the narrative.” That’s how she landed on the club sequences, in which a daughter sees her father out of time as strobe lights flash. “I think, in many ways, that is what writing was,” she explains. “It was making my way through memories and dealing with various feelings and ultimately dealing with grief.”
But Wells also puts a distance between herself and the story that Aftersun eventually tells. It’s personal to her, but not autobiographical. She went on many vacations with her dad; this one is invented, though she does admit that Corio looks almost exactly like she did at a young age.
Wells, Corio, and Mescal spent two weeks together before they started shooting, developing a bond that would ultimately seep through the final product. During that period Wells let her young star’s personality shape not only some of the dialogue—one particularly affecting line was something the now 12-year-old Corio said, which Wells then wrote into the screenplay—but also how the trio would approach the material. Corio, Wells says, didn’t really want to deal with sadness in any way, so Mescal worked hard to conceal his character’s inner turmoil from his costar almost in the same manner Calum is shielding his kid from his own hurt. “She isn’t the character; she really is performing,” Wells says. “But it was interesting the way she brought her own sensibility to the performance. Ultimately, Frankie surprised us all the time.”
Mescal and Corio were also, quite literally, responsible for shooting some of Aftersun’s key sequences, which unfold on a digital video camcorder that Calum has brought on the trip. When Wells added those moments to the screenplay, she was aware it would add another complication to an already tricky shoot. Still, the allure of what it could represent was too much to resist. “I love the idea of the DV as anchors of fact, almost like a permanent record of moments that happened,” she says. “I love the idea of the footage being quite banal.
The DV moments were another way for Wells to infuse the story with her characters’ specific point of view—you’re seeing Calum through Sophie’s eyes, and her through his—as well as nostalgia for the 1990s, even if those who didn’t grow up on the medium can be put off by it. “I think some people find that footage to be completely intolerable, but I think there are other people, especially those of my generation, who find DV footage to be as beautiful as other people find Super 8,” says Wells, who was born in 1987.
Aftersun, Wells recognizes, isn’t a film that holds the viewer’s hand—and now that the film is out in the world, visiting various festivals, Wells has been relishing watching how people have responded to her elliptical creation.
“I think there is a lot in there to perceive,” she says. “There are many layers, and no single person will ever perceive them all. Everybody picks up on different details. Everybody sees slightly different arcs. It feels in some strange way I’ve created a choose your own adventure that reaches the same conclusion.” It’s not easy to describe, but it is powerful to behold.