I think it’s nice that we share the same sky: “Aftersun” and the Mortality of Fatherhood
On my television set, Calum sits naked at the edge of his hotel bed, sobbing uncontrollably until his body convulses into a familiar shiver. You can’t see her, but it’s implied that his young daughter Sophie is somewhere nearby, witnessing her father’s breakdown. He’s having the kind of cry where you breathe through your teeth and gobs of snot pool in the space between your bottom lip and gums. My living room is dark, much like Calum and Sophie’s space, save for a Christmas tree keeping guard by the front window. I’m sitting in the same spot where I heard my father produce a similar kind of cry six years ago, on an evening much warmer than this one.
Hollywood has never had a shortage of films that explore the dynamics between a single father and his child. From To Kill a Mockingbird to Kramer vs. Kramer to The Pursuit of Happiness to Marriage Story, cinema is always examining the throughlines of fatherhood in the midst of heartbreak, whether that stems from a separation, divorce, or even mental illness. In Aftersun, Calum and Sophie are not heroes. The only victory they are working toward is a semblance of joy found in sharing each other’s company. Charlotte Wells’ directorial debut is one of the saddest films of the last 10 years, if not the absolute saddest. The plot, a father and daughter taking to a different country on a vacation together, isn’t wholly original, but it’s devastatingly familiar in how it flexes the subtle, simple nuances of a man slowly withering away in the company of his daughter, who is on the brink of becoming a teenager.
A good portion of Aftersun is told through camcorder footage that’s being watched by Sophie in adulthood. It’s been 20 years since she and Calum took to Turkey for a vacation together. They stay at a resort, where they film each other swimming underwater in the pool, eat meals provided by the hotel, and play arcade games. There’s nothing explicitly beautiful about the setting, other than it being oceanside. The only time we see the two characters interact with the nearby Mediterranean Sea is during quiet moments, either when they are admiring the faraway horizon after a morning dip, or when Calum walks into the water, fully clothed, in the black and blue tint of midnight.
Calum and Sophie do what tourists must when they are at a (probably) 3-star resort for a week: They lay around sipping drinks, take a mud bath, do karaoke, and, very cautiously, apply a lot of sunscreen while lounging poolside. There is a moment, when they are on a boat together, where the camera pans to Calum’s hands resting atop Sophie’s. Throughout the movie, the two characters rarely share many physical embraces, making the gesture all the more powerful, especially in the wake of Calum’s not-so-secret flashes of detachment, which he very quietly tries to hide.
At a local shop, Calum buys a $900 rug he cannot afford. It’s an unspoken nod to his own finite perspective on living, which he confirms later by saying “I can’t see myself at 40, to be honest” to a stranger while scuba diving. I can see myself in Calum, when he spends money he doesn’t have on a material possession he believes will outlast him. While my partner is in Pennsylvania visiting her mother, I take to eBay to buy a needless item, like a vintage T-shirt or an old Huckle Cat McDonald’s toy. Snow cakes the window by my bedside as I consider what I would do without the bugs humming just beyond my grasp, or this Cure tour shirt from 1992. Calum’s lack of strong financial footing is subtly told through small moments, most powerfully when he smokes someone’s freshly discarded cigarette butt while walking along the street. When I cannot afford groceries, I live on the almost never-ending supply of garlic parmesan-flavored sunflower seeds stored in the back of my kitchen cabinet.
I do not think of my own mortality in terms of whether or not I will test its limits voluntarily. Rather, I often wonder how far into this life I can go, how long this body has left, what joys it might be able to offer somebody else. When Sophie rests on the hotel bed, she plainly says “I just feel a bit down, or something” to her father. They just had a great day at the resort, but as the evening winds down, and the inexplicable tiredness sets in, Sophie is unable to properly articulate why she feels like she’s sinking all of a sudden. She fills the lonely parts of her days by hanging out with older kids who talk about sex, or kissing the boy she played a motorcycle game against in the arcade. Calum attempts to submerge his own demons with Tai chi, self-help books, and by disappearing for hours.
Aftersun is a profound movie, but not because it has the commercial value of big-budget studio pictures, or some great philosophical lesson to be learned within its own subtext. No, it’s remarkable for how well it showcases the minimalism of our own sadness. There is not a moment where Calum has some great realization that he is sad or miserable, or that not even the immense love he holds for his daughter can save him. Instead we see familiar, mundane vacation tropes interwoven with fleeting snippets of devastating gestures of human sorrow. While filming her father, Sophie asks him, “When you were 11, what did you think you would be doing now?” Calum doesn’t have an answer. He became a dad at a young age, and, presumably, many of his dreams took a backseat to raising Sophie.
On a vacation to Ocean Isle in 2021, I found myself taking extra time alone in my condo bedroom, as family members congregated elsewhere for dinner and games. After a morning full of swimming and tanning, the Earth had, suddenly, tumbled into my chest, as if the tide combing the sand a half-dozen floors below had somehow found its way upstairs. One room over, my dad lay in bed with a beer in hand, watching television as the sun began to set just beneath the west end of our beach. It was our first vacation in 14 years; he spent most of it drinking in the condo, returning home with little tan to show for a week spent in 90-degree, sun-stained North Carolina. At one point, my mom wandered to the sand crying because he wouldn’t be with her outside.
20 years prior, in the drumming heat of the same state, I sat on a condo couch in only my underwear. My dad, dressed the same, hummed over a beach drink as we watched a NASCAR race on the squarest television this side of Zenith. We’d just spent the entire day playing together in the kiddie pool and building sand castles; at one point my Cleveland Indians hat blew off my head and soared into the ocean. Dad rushed to retrieve it. He was my hero then and there, as he would be again in the air-conditioned sitting room of our rented condo, as we looked cool and felt cool sitting on a wicker couch in our skivvies. I held my sippy cup similar to how he held his glass; manspread my legs with an identical gait.
Now, my dad has alcoholic dementia on top of a short fuse, diabetes, rotting teeth, and high blood pressure. We don’t talk much. When we do, it’s a lecture about something. He gets his days confused, watches M*A*S*H and The Andy Griffith Show reruns all day when he’s not working as a delivery driver for Advance Auto Parts. After my grandmother died, when I caught him in a convulsive cry, alone, in our living room, I lost him. Not physically, but emotionally. After that, every so often, he’d erupt in an unshakable, exhausted fit of despair. He’d whimper at the thought of his own mother or something unknowable to me entirely, while tapping his foot and playing soft rock tunes on his 15-year-old iPod Nano in a room lit only by a flickering television.
In the climax of Aftersun, if you can call it that, Callum takes to the dancefloor on his and Sophie’s last night in Turkey. Queen and David Bowie’s “Under Pressure” plays in a blitz, and Callum’s dance moves are adorable and lovingly embarrassing. If I were Sophie, I, too, wouldn’t want to join in. By the time I was her age, I’d learned how little dignity we all have and that we mustn't waste it. When I danced to the Bee Gees’ “More Than a Woman” with my dad on our back deck, as tiki torch flames killed mosquitos and airplanes flew low overhead, I wasn’t embarrassed so much as I was happy to feel loved enough to be present with him. Nowadays I don’t dance very much, only to provoke a smile out of my partner when she has fallen into that all-too-familiar funk I’ve watched unfurl in my own father.
I came to Aftersun via A24’s TikTok account. Admittedly, I had long lost touch on most new movie releases. The day before Aftersun’s release, A24 posted a clip of Calum dancing to “Under Pressure.” A noticeably embarrassed Sophie lurks behind the camera while her dad dances in the foreground. All seems well, a core memory shared between a father and daughter. What A24 didn’t disclose is that the scene is one of the film’s last, before Calum sees Sophie off at the airport, as she heads back to the safety of her mother’s house, and Calum walks away back to his own country but ends up in a distorted, strobing dance where adult Sophie is now holding him warmly.
Like Sophie with her camcorder footage, I only have a photo album from that beach trip in 2001 to remember my dad by. I used to look at it often when I was little, in hopes of reliving the magic, as another year without a family trip came and went. Dad lives next door to me now, but he is only my father by inherited title, not by effort. Over the years, he became consumed by loss: His brother killed himself. Both of his parents died within a year of each other. He lost two great, well-paying jobs within five years. He got hooked on hard liquor, along with a regimen of 12+ beers a night, and separated from my mom for a month before she reluctantly took him back. Our family dog died of liver failure four days before Christmas. I, too, have been adjacent to all of that loss, on top of my own.
I have spent far too much of my life trying to understand who my dad is. I look backwards and cannot put the pieces together into something that coherently makes sense. He has been many things: A baseball coach, a member of his high school’s alumni association, a purchasing agent for a factory. But those are just titles. I suppose the harsh reality of being someone’s child is the burden of never really comprehending the genetic blueprint of the people who made us. Why did my dad burst into tears randomly while watching Dazed and Confused one night, while I doomscrolled on my phone in my bedroom 15 feet away? He must’ve thought about something, I’m sure of it. A memory that has long consumed him in sadness. I never thought to emerge from beyond my locked door, or to ask him what was wrong. Would it have mattered?
He calls me randomly as I’m running errands and says he needs me to go buy something for him that he plans on gifting to my mom for Christmas. I say, “Okay, Dad.” He follows that up with an exhausted reminder about a flower pot on the porch that needs to be removed so I can shovel snow. “Okay, Dad,” I tell him. We don’t exchange an “I love you” before hanging up, haven’t for some time now. “And love dares you to change our way of caring about ourselves,” Bowie sings in the outro of “Under Pressure.” At what point did my dad fall out of love with me, or with the romance of being a father? Presumably, it was sometime after I grew out of Sophie’s age in Aftersun, when I was no longer just a child, but a teenager making increasingly bad decisions in a short amount of time. One morning before school, I mouthed off to him over something irrelevant. He pushed me into the bathroom closet door and ripped my favorite Aeropostale shirt. I’ve forgiven him now, but sometimes I go back to every instance of violence and replace it with a hug. Nothing changes, but retrospect does feel softer when you’ve convinced yourself it always was.
Many movies have made me cry: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Waterboy, Cars, Philadelphia. For the last 15 minutes of Aftersun, though, I was merely on the verge of tears, the ledge where your sinuses plug with firecrackers and you get this static in your chest that tightens like a vice as each second moves forward. I had not felt that kind of pressure before while watching a movie, nor have I ever bellowed a phlegm-caked sob quite like I did as Calum walked out of the airport door and back onto the dancefloor where he and Sophie lovingly embraced for the last time. For the first 3/4s of the movie, everything feels mildly off-centered. There is some kind of darkness looming throughout, but no moment lasts long enough to register any immediate emotion. And that is what makes Aftersun so compelling. It is a movie that, much like real life grief, takes fragments of memory, slight reactions, and otherwise inconsequential interactions and allows them to swell into a singular emotional climax once you realize what’s happening on-screen is, likely, the last moment of closeness between a daughter and her father.
When older Sophie turns the camcorder off, she now understands what plagued her father 20 years ago. Maybe not completely, but more so than she had when she was 11. She doesn’t say it outright, but you can see it in her face. Where Calum is in that moment–presumably dead, or, at the very least, estranged from his daughter somehow–is uncertain. Sophie has an entire life now, with a wife and daughter in tow. Yet she still searches for meaning in that Turkey vacation. Perhaps she lost her dad sometime quickly after she got back on a plane to Scotland. Calum’s rug isn’t in frame when we see Sophie for the last time, but you might be right to assume that she has it somewhere in her apartment. Many of the moments we do see in-between the flickers of home-video footage, like Calum’s full body cry, or him walking into the ocean, are shown with Sophie out of frame, most likely because it’s her imagination putting the pieces she missed back into place. But I think “Under Pressure” was wrong: It’s not the terror of knowing what this world is about; it’s the terror of losing a love you were supposed to have forever.
I go to the window of my bedroom and see my father lumbering down the driveway with mail in his hand. He is a large, stoic figure, with footsteps heavy as cement. When I was 15, he got furious at me and my mom over something one of us said, left the house, and drove drunk, only to return a few hours later in silence and fall into bed. I had my door locked and hid beside my bed, as those thunderous feet pushed far into the carpet of our lone hallway. Nothing happened, but I wish I’d known that then. I used to think about what it meant to not have a good relationship with someone who helped bring you into this world. I didn’t think about it much back then; it’s all I think about now.
I wish I could go back to that night, though, when Dad’s quiet faded into a Herculean snore and I prayed for the last time in my life. I didn’t know where he went or what he thought about. Did he give up a dream to be my dad? Maybe, as he took his car across the backroads of our small town, he pulled over and considered what it might be like to go someplace where he and I didn’t share the same sky. Maybe it was then that he turned around and decided to come home. I was still a child then and shouldn’t have been asking questions about someone I was never supposed to really know. Yet there I went and there I still go, reaching backwards, my whole life still ahead of me, as familiar love recedes untouchably.