Aftersun
I watched this nearly a month ago and have only now gotten around to writing a few words because, mostly, it didn’t do a lot for me. In amongst genres and setups that will hook me instantly regardless of the quality (courtroom, exorcism, time loop) the one that’s told through a child’s perspective while a bunch of (inevitably more interesting) adult things happen around the periphery has never been particularly interesting to me. I got recommended the book Before We Were Free years ago and, while I did end up reading the whole thing, all of the interesting stuff happened off the page. It’s like the Simpsons joke about jazz, you have to listen to the notes she isn’t playing and yes, I can do that at home.
And here, we have the grownup Sophie looking back at the VHS footage of her dad from when they went on holidays to Turkey at some point around the 1990s. She’s mad about it, presumably because dad suicided shortly afterwards and she doesn’t really know why. The movie has a scene of him walking into the sea at night to hammer this home a little bit, but since we’re ostensibly on Sophie’s memories, she obviously didn’t see that. But dad presumably had some kind of depression (through I’ve seen reviews speculating he was in the closet and had AIDs), and one way or another is no longer around ten or fifteen years later.
Sophie in the past is 11 years old, so on the cusp of puberty and kind of interested in a boy whom she kisses a little, but not as full on as the teens she’s hanging around with. She has quite a nice holiday, goes swimming, has dinner, sees some kind of Turkish amphitheatre ruins. All of this is kind of dull. Yes, I know there are implications and atmosphere and all that, but that only takes one so far.