An exploration of memory and loss in the ending scene of Aftersun

Isabel Rose Hay, University of Bristol, Film and Theatre BA, Year 1
Introduction to Film and Television Studies, formative essay, awarded 81/100 first class.

Aftersun (Charlotte Wells, 2022) follows the last holiday Sophie (Frankie Corio) took with her father, Calum (Paul Mescal), when she was 11. VHS footage structures the narrative, interwoven with Sophie’s real and imagined memories, which builds a picture of their relationship. Sophie grapples with reconciling two versions of Calum: the father figure she grew up with and the man she never truly knew. In this essay, I will examine how Well’s aesthetic and formal choices pertaining to editing and cinematography contribute to the film’s wider meanings. Specifically, I will investigate how themes of memory and loss are explored in Aftersun’s ending scene.

The contrastive editing of Sophie and Calum’s ‘last dance’ reveals a lot of meaning. The penultimate scene begins with Calum dancing, carefree and adorned by coloured light, beckoning Sophie to join. This cuts to adult Sophie watching Calum at a rave, dancing with jolting and convulsive movements before jump-cutting back into young Sophie’s memory. Another harsh cut returns the audience to the present, we see adult Sophie shouting angrily at her father and reaching for him. The scene continues to alternate between the timeframes. Wells employs a discontinuous editing style by manipulating the temporal order of the scene, cutting between memory and present reality. This disorientates time and confuses the receiver, aligning them with Sophie’s confusion. Navigating conflicting emotions of grief and resentment, Sophie doesn’t fully understand the loss of her dad, and nor does the audience as they are granted access through Sophie’s disoriented point of view. The hard-cut editing which jumps between timeframes draws attention to important parallels and contrasts. Sophie’s memories are shown through close cut-ins on Calum which highlight details of his flesh and body, dancing and wholly alive. When embracing, they fill the entire frame, giving the moment a sense of intimacy and heightening the emotional impact. Their display of familial love dominates the frame with importance. These compositional choices, alongside comparatively high key lighting and warm colour grading, present the memory as cinematic and positively heartfelt. This indicates Sophie is savouring the happiness of the memory, in the moment through a tight embrace and in hindsight by dwelling on the detail and joy. The composition could also be read in terms of Sophie’s response to loss. Searching behaviour is a recognised aspect of grief and refers to the desire to repair the lost physical attachment of a person, by seeking out sights, smells or feelings associated with them. Such detailed remembering creates a sense that Sophie is trying to bring herself close to her late father.

Whilst the action between the two spaces is similar wherein Sophie watches her dad from afar, moves towards him and they embrace, an entirely different tone is created in adult Sophie’s scene through visual style. Sophie observes Calum dancing in a pitch-black expanse and the action is revealed by sporadic, ephemeral flashes of light. Strobing light and crowded bodies evoke a claustrophobic and uncertain anxiety in the viewer. Well’s fast-paced, dynamic editing style with sudden flurries of shots disorientates space. This, together with obscuring darkness, restricts the audience from witnessing the scene, aligning them with Sophie’s fragmented memory of her father. She must use evidence from VHS tapes and her imagination to recreate a full picture of the holiday and her dad. Sophie can see her dad through the flickering light, but he is never fully attainable or corporeal. When illuminated, Calum and Sophie are dissected from the black background, portrayed as solitary figures attached to no space at all. This dark expanse may reflect an afterlife – the only place Sophie can observe her father after his death. Alternatively, it could be indicative of the consuming, depressive state that would have overcome Calum prior to his insinuated suicide. This shows adult Sophie has a more realistic view of her dad’s mental health, now old enough to understand and relate to the troubles behind Calum’s calm exterior. This juxtaposes young Sophie’s idealised perspective of the dance, reflecting the manipulatable nature of memory, where Sophie can recall her childhood with her father positively, despite her current knowledge of his struggles. By placing Sophie in the darkness with Calum, Wells may be suggesting Sophie shares his depressive tendencies, earlier alluded to when Sophie describes feelings of ‘sinking’. Despite this, young Sophie is presented as an upbeat and well-adjusted child, demonstrated by Corio’s smiley performance waving goodbye to Calum. This draws contrasts between the sanctuary of childhood and the realities of adulthood in both experience and perspective of the world, making the ending revelation even more heartbreaking. When Calum eventually falls into the darkness, the audience is shown a low-angle perspective of Sophie looking down at him. As a child, she smiles widely but as an adult, her face is serious and disappointed. The flashes between the two draw a direct comparison between her young and adult self, showcasing the effect of her loss; where she was once joyful, she is now withdrawn, grieving, and angry at him for choosing to leave her.

In the following scene, narrative perspective is granted to Calum as his goodbye to Sophie unfolds. Well’s use of the VHS offers full visual authority to Calum and the audience witnesses the event through his subjective perception. The camera’s shaky movement and low quality denote the style of handheld footage, connoting the reminiscence of a nostalgia-soaked memory of Sophie’s final moments with her father. The camera’s instability could mirror Calum’s emotional volatility; he is shaking with emotion at the prospect of saying a final goodbye. The zoomed-in shot creates a close-up of Sophie, identifying her as the primary focus. This is amplified by subjective tracking shots which keep Sophie central to the frame composition and thereby to Calum’s perspective of the world. In juxtaposition to the camera movement, the VHS clip freezes on an image of Sophie waving goodbye. The camera dwells on Sophie and compresses the narrative tense, freezing her in Calum’s memory. This could indicate a final moment of clarity for Calum as he focuses on the most important part of his life before he ends his. As will soon be revealed, the VHS footage presented to the audience is being watched on television by adult Sophie. She is likely using the tapes to fill gaps in her memory and transport herself to a time when they were together. Again, this could be perceived as a searching behaviour where she uses visual stimuli to feel closer to Calum. Revealing that adult Sophie is playing the VHS clip brings significance to the frozen frame – perhaps she is not only searching for her father, but remainders of her past self as she grieves the loss of who she was before his death and a future taken from her.

Then, the camera pans to unrestrict the audience’s view and reveals the clip as footage on a television screen. The movement, symbolic of time passing, establishes an apartment. Cool-toned, melancholic colour grading creates a stagnant and lifeless tone, harshly juxtaposing the warm nostalgia and dreamlike effect of Sophie’s memories. It mirrors the cool colouring of imagined scenes of Calum, developing the theory that Sophie now struggles like him. At 180 degrees, adult Sophie is revealed watching the tapes in cathartic reminiscence. The binary opposition between a smiley young Sophie and a mournful adult Sophie is highly emotive for the audience; a singular camera movement bridges the gap between who she was and who she is – everything that her father will not be there to witness. The crossing of the 180-degree line places adult Sophie where the receiver would be, cementing the narrative from Sophie’s physical and mental perspective. This anchors the theory that the film is Sophie’s memory of Calum, collated through what she remembers, evidence from the VHS, and her imagination. The audience has become a witness to Sophie’s retelling of events, meaning scenes of Calum where Sophie is not present were likely fabricated by a mature, aware Sophie.

A 360-degree rotation reveals Calum behind the VHS camera and shows him turning away and walking through an empty corridor, suggestive of a liminal space. The full rotation back to the moment at the airport implies it was a pivotal moment in Sophie’s life, the catalyst for her entire world changing. The camera is still as Calum walks further away, out of frame and into Sophie’s memory. Calum’s death is never confirmed but is inferred when he enters the dark room. The ambiguous ending is ironic: the audience is left feeling incomplete, a full sense of conclusion taken from them, echoing Sophie’s experience of loss. However, the story is not in the ending, but in all the small moments we remember. Wells uses memory as a storytelling device to explore loss, emphasising how memories are important in the face of grief. Through visual and narrative choices, she draws attention to dualistic themes of Aftersun: adulthood and childhood, love and loss, and memory and reality.