Theres a crack in everything—that’s how the light gets in.
I recently came across this quote, and I can’t get it out of my head. It evokes a powerful, pinching image that pierces my perception of life surrounding me, connecting to the Japanese concept of kintsugi: The beauty of broken things.
There is something rather heartwarming, especially in times where hope seems hard to find, in the celebration of one’s wounds. This quote strikes in me a blind faith of how, even fractured, it is still possible to hold onto the breaths of fresh air that life sneaks through the crevices.
Aftersun (2022) is a film by the Welsh filmmaker Charlotte Welsh, who turned her directorial debut into an intimate and deeply personal letter to her past as a daughter. At the age of 16 years old she lost her father; an intermittent, yet never completely uninvolved figure throughout her life, as she remembers him. Inspired by an old photograph of her childhood, she began to write the script of the film to complete the picture within her understanding of the time they spend together. The realization of, and reconciliation with, a reality she failed to know, whose nuances she discovered when she reached the age her father was when he died, and she looked back on her past. Welsh built a bridge, based on her own personal reminiscences, transforming it into a public act—in which anyone could find themselves—through a search for memories and their answers to a present marked by gaps, in an effort to understand who her father was.
Like the cracks of kintsugi, and the characters in the film Aftersun, it allows us to grasp how understanding doesn’t always come from wholeness, but rather from interpreting the different shades of light that emerge through the new, fractured, pattern.
The film follows a father, Calum (Paul Mescal) and a daughter, Sophie (Frankie Corio) in their summer vacations in Turkey, somewhere along the 90s. In parallel, Sophie appears already as an adult, 20 years after that summer, attempting to rebuild the identity of a father she’s come to realize that never knew.
This search, made mainly from VHS tapes—the guiding thread who will conduct the whole narrative —, introduces the idea of memory being something uncompleted. Something that, as life keeps on going, gets a newer interpretation that we shape with the versions of ourselves we grow into every single time.
Memory is not always a loyal and truthful register.
Have you ever noticed how much one’s memory changes over time? Have you ever realized the apparently useless details we save in our minds, without understanding the place they hold? All the possible answers to these questions are revealed in Aftersun: Each everyday scene, seemingly trivial, becomes a testament of how everything acquires weight through the adult gaze. The small details surrounding her 1990s self turn into tentative answers she gives herself twenty years later.
Memories, much like the film’s editing, are not linear. There is nothing accidental in the jumps, cuts, or fade-outs of the film’s montage; they mirror the flow of thought itself, constantly moving back and forth, lingering on certain moments before dissolving into others. Rather than following a classical continuity style, the film operates through an affective associative flow, in which images emerge in response to emotional triggers. This creates a temporal layering where different moments coexist and overlap. Flashbacks are not clearly marked, dissolving into other timelines without clear demarcation. The result is an oscillation between temporal planes in which editing functions as a mechanism of memory itself.
This idea is further reinforced by the film’s visual composition. Throughout the holiday scenes, Calum is often framed through mirrors, glass tables, television screens, and other reflective surfaces, as if the version of him Sophie remembers were only a reflection of the man he truly was. Like memory itself, these images offer access to him while simultaneously obscuring him, suggesting that neither Sophie nor the audience can ever fully grasp his inner life.
Regarding this point, it is crucial to equally highlight the element of the water, which could also be seen as a visual metaphor of the mind. Water flows, never able to be completely caught. Along with the movie we witness captivating shots of the sole movement of water, as well as the hand of Sophie trying to almost caress pools and the blue seas. Water reflects how memories slip away in her hands, changing shapes depending on the way they are touched, as well as their intentions. To evaporate, filter, drain or apply pressure; method interacts differently with the water. The choice of the method shapes the final result, and understanding the differences allows for more appropriate decisions depending on the specific needs of the situation. Aftersun reconstructs the past as something not much different than water— unstable and under constant transformation. The key point to the understanding of the story, as it happens in most narratives, is the perspective. In the film, it is all filtered through the eyes of adult Sophie, which means a whole reinterpretation of every scene that unfolded in front of her eyes during that summer in childhood.
The story we, as spectators witness, is not “what happened” but what her old version was able to remember. This implies that the apparent daily nature of her father during the trip acquires a whole new message— gestures, silences, mood swings— for which adult Sophie attempts to draw the true identity of Calum. However, the very same distance—both temporal and emotional— shows the impossibility to understand all with certitude.
To remember, is not only to revisit our past, but to revive it. Memory is an act of assistance, only alive if it is experienced.
We, including his own daughter, never get to meet his real self, but the remembered version. The one built by memories and videotapes of their summer together. The videotapes play a key role in the narrative throughout the film; they bring a sense of authenticity and reassurance on the memories of Sophie. However, the images are limited, unable to capture the emotional dimension. It’s adult Sophie the one who, based on those delimited bits of reality, decodes this material based on her very own personal knowledge, acquired by growing up.
In the same vein, the “dark space” scenes in Aftersun hide a striking impact in Sophie’s memory. Unlike the rest of the narrative, always closely following the everyday intimacy with static shots, these sequences emerge as disorienting and highly sensory fragments. They take place in an undefined, almost entirely black space illuminated only by intermittent flashes of lighting. Withing this darkness, figures appear and disappear in brief burst of visibility, before being swallowed again by a shadow. Throughout the film we see some of these vague, hectic scenes; evoking nightclubs or mental limbos, that seem to break the film’s dialogue. Nevertheless, they are completely intentional, as by breaking with the realism of the rest of the film, they represent the realest element of them all: Sophie’s failed attempt at connection with her father. They all point out in a pungent way the impossibility of fully accessing the past; to draw any certitude from the moments lived. In this construction music and sound are fundamental, as they trigger memories, emphasizing the absorption and distortion of the sound over a physical narration. How memory is experienced less as a stable image than as an atmosphere.
Sometimes, when oblivion strikes, leaving us facing a dead end in the avenues of our subconscious, it is the smallest sensation that acts as a key. We may not remember the conversation we had on the bus yesterday, what time it was when we got home today, or the drunk message we sent some nights ago; yet the scent of the boy who broke my heart, the face of my best friend whenever I listen to “Wonderwall”, or the taste of the dish my grandmother used to cook, become my Ariadne’s thread— allowing me not only to escape the Minotaur, but to find my way back to the hidden center of myself.
We tend to recall atmospheres rather than clear explanations; underlining how the past is a feeling, rather than a logical sequence. In this line of thought, we find the climax of the film: The Under Pressure scene. Here, we find one of the most direct and vulnerable forms of Calum’s expression. Everything unfolds through gestures; his body speaks and reveals what he could never do with words. To the aching, yet quietly hopeful, refrain:
“This is our last dance (…) this is ourselves”
where the sequence acquires a devastating meaning to the sound of Queen and Bowie. We witness a superimposition of images that show Sophie and her father hugging, then being pushed away, drifting apart. Sophie reaches for him, but he repeatedly slips away from her grasp. These juxtapositions announce a farewell: the final moment of connection before an irreversible loss. All of this takes place within a haze of confusion, shaped by rapid camera movement, and enveloped in those “dark spaces” sequences. Sophie’s memories are being stirred, unable to remain still.
For the viewer it crystallizes the film’s central tragedy – love is not always enough to traverse the distance between two people. Calum’s ghosts will ultimately lead him to take his own life; this transforms what seems to be a simple dance into their grand finale, as the song suggests, their final shared moment. It captures the quiet rupture between them, but also the exit of Sophie’s childhood, marked by the confusion that remains when love has been placed into a void that cannot return it.
Sometimes what hurts the most is not taking a moment to say goodbye.
Death is a universal ending, but it doesn’t preclude another form of permanence: that which is built in the memory of others. If there is someone to tell our story, we will continue to exist. Maybe after all Shakespeare was right in Hamlet, and as long as we have our own personal Horatio—Hamlet’s companion who outlives him, becoming the voice of his friend’s legacy — we could all incarnate the protagonist when our time comes and cross the threshold of memory.
Remember me, says the protagonist in the eponymous work when his time arrives, as for him; the rest is silence. Aftersun is proof that while there is an attempt to remember; to tell stories and make them come alive, life will not have been lost.
The ending won’t be final.