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Aftersun Movie Review

Aftersun is a 2022 British drama film directed by Charlotte Wells and starring Paul Mescal and Frankie Coro. It is an arthouse movie that is very limited in its appeal.

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“I think that the fact that we can both see the Sun,

so even though we’re not actually in the same place

and we’re not actually together,

we kind of are in a way“

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Sophie reflects on the shared joy and private melancholy of a holiday she took with her father twenty years earlier. Memories real and imagined fill the gaps between as she tries to reconcile the father she knew with the man she didn’t. Apparently, this is an autobiographical story for the director Charlotte Wells and that was inherently the biggest problem here – it felt too intimate and limited in scope and appeal.

Reading the reviews for this movie, you’d think that it’s this thought-provoking movie about identity, memory and how complex human memory is with passing time and how our relationships with our loved ones change with time. These are all fascinating themes, that goes without question. But you don’t really find them in this movie, and certainly you don’t get to see them explored in any more meaningful manner.

The dialogue is way too scarce for me. There was a constant emphasis on slow, silent sequences that are overly extended, uneventful and plain pointless in certain moments. It represents everything that is frustrating about arthouse cinema and why it’s so far from universal in its appeal. I was bored throughout and I had no interest in the story or the characters.

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Paul Mescal is pretty good and so was Frankie Coro. Both developed a genuinely strong relationship here, which was important for the story, but the characterization suffered due to its slow pace and an emphasis on visuals and ambiguity instead of storytelling and character development. We do not get to know them properly and the entire movie is vague, but in a very annoying way. The tender, sensual and endearing tone was very memorable and the cinematography was also strong, but otherwise the film was a giant waste of time.