The succession of placid vignettes of that stay in the hotel in the 90s, seasoned with the inevitable home videos, try to rescue a lost paradise with weak ominous shadows that immerse the viewer in a slow and at times frankly soporific story. There is a non-contemporaneous shot earlier where he walks into the sea at night in Turkey, a clear signal as to his intentions, or perhaps the past when he committed suicide, just not maybe the exact place. We don't get much insight into Sophie's life before or after her father, making it difficult to feel emotionally invested in their relationship. I was crying without realising and also on the tube home - the tears just kept coming but it was nothing to do with me. The story is told partially through flashbacks and is primarily set in summertime, which gives the film a dreamy, nostalgic atmosphere.

I loved the staging of a particular scene, Sophie takes a small glance through the keyhole as she watches girl "hand job" gesture while she brags about it with her friends. Twenty years later, Sophie's tender recollections of their last holiday become a powerful and heartrending portrait of their relationship, as she tries to reconcile the father she knew with the man she didn't, in Charlotte Wells' superb and searingly emotional debut film.Even though it is not the same case at all, I remember the times as a kid I closed the door on my dad because he would come home late from work. Glimpses of the adult Sophie (Celia Rowlson-Hall), wistfully looking back at the trip and haunted by visions of Calum dancing in a strobe-lit nightclub, further muddy the waters, hinting at the tension between real and imagined memories. It is full of light, happy moments they shared between each other but it always fades into bitterness till the last goodbye.

The slow pace really gives the viewer time to take in everything, as it's the small details that count here. That pan continues back to our (and Sophie's) last view of Colum, pausing his camera, walking back, down a hall and disappearing behind distant doors. Writing in Empire, Beth Webb praised the film as being a "deftly orchestrated, empathetic and honest character study" and "A triumph of new British filmmaking. And, to complicate matters further, the film's poor sound quality regularly obscures the characters' dialogue behind their thick Scottish accents, and its often-dark, overly muddled cinematography made some images difficult to decipher at times. These tensions between child and adult perspectives, between naivety and understanding, between experience and loss can always be interesting.There’s more than a hint of the tactility of Lynne Ramsay’s early works, with short films such as Gasman (1997) and features such as Ratcatcher (1999) clearly serving as inspirations. O. Scott described the film as "astonishing and devastating" and commended Wells for "very nearly reinventing the language of film, unlocking the medium's often dormant potential to disclose inner worlds of consciousness and feeling. Aftersun is a 2022 coming-of-age drama film written and directed by Charlotte Wells in her feature directorial debut. Sophie reflects on the shared joy and private melancholy of a holiday she took with her father twenty years earlier.

The dim strobing scenes of dancing with Sophie as an adult flash glimpses of what she can now see, as an adult and mother, what she couldn't see then, a very serious and somewhat unhinged man, the reality of his state of mind she failed to see as a child. In an early shot we hear Sophie's steady breathing, asleep in the foreground, while on the balcony behind Colum labours through tai chi exercises - while smoking! As a Turkish person, its just both amazing and heartbreaking from the point of view of the director that this word resonates with her feelings from a place she had this holiday with her late father. Composer Oliver Coates weaves his way in and out of the film’s emotional labyrinth, while deftly chosen needle drops (including a mashed-up vocal version of the Queen-David Bowie hit Under Pressure) put us right there in the moment.

The film's central irony is that in this rare extended visit the young girl proves to have the poise, character and maturity of an adult, while her father reveals the weak, troubled helplessness of a child. But man, that ending comes along and wallops you, and you realize all at once that the movie is about so much, and that's it's been gradually revealing its layers to you all along.

A succession of vignettes about a more or less placid everyday life is not enough (such as applying sunscreen or post-sunscreen, the Aftersun of the title). Despite the young Sophie's observant nature, she is oblivious to the signs of her father's depression. While Sophie wistfully wishes they could stay at the resort forever we watch the photo slowly developing, firming up to clarity, a miniature of the slowly revealing montages we have been absorbing.Scene by scene, we are given clues into Calum's mental health, and how he's subsequently battling with depression.