Aftersun

Aftersun is structured around an adult's attempt to interpret childhood footage she only half-understood at the time. Charlotte Wells refuses to explain what is happening to Calum in plain terms. The film asks the viewer to piece together depression, financial strain, and emotional absence from cues a child would have missed.

That restraint is the film's thesis. Memory does not come pre-annotated. The process of re-seeing a parent's suffering is itself the grief, and Wells's screenplay is built entirely around that retrospective labor.

Paul Mescal's Calum is a master class in strategic gentleness. He plays a young father who is mostly holding it together for his daughter and occasionally, privately, not — and the performance refuses to telegraph which scene is which.

Frankie Corio's Sophie is among the best child performances of the last two decades. She is neither precocious nor naïve; she is a specific eleven-year-old with her own attention economy, and her chemistry with Mescal is the spine of the film.

Gregory Oke's cinematography and Blair McClendon's editing intercut adult-Sophie's imagined strobe-lit rave with the camcorder holiday footage. The result is a formal metaphor for the act of remembering — the past is only accessible in fragments, and the emotional truth lives in the interval between them.

The 'Under Pressure' sequence is already a canonical scene of 2020s cinema. Wells uses Bowie and Mercury's track not as needle-drop but as a structural detonation that reframes everything that came before it.

Pros: One of the most assured feature debuts in years; a father-daughter dynamic that never sentimentalizes itself; a final sequence that earns every formal risk.

Cons: Deliberately elliptical — viewers who need explicit narrative will find it frustrating; quietness is an active choice, not a gap; the film rewards a second viewing more than most.