Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Aftersun
2022 · Charlotte Wells · Aftersun on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the picture change shape when the camcorder is on. (camera)
Two formats run through the film: clean wide digital for the holiday and squarer, smeared, color-shifted video for what Sophie shot herself in 1999. Faces sometimes drop into shadow on the tape.
Payoff: One image is the holiday as the film sees it. The other is the only piece of it she actually owns.
Notice when the film refuses to show you a face. (camera)
Gregory Oke keeps the camera beside people rather than inside the scene. The reaction shot you expect does not come, or comes a beat late, or arrives cut off at the edge of frame.
Payoff: You are trained to read backs, hands and posture instead of expressions. The film makes you work for everything. In the reading: the readable image (lectosign). The reading calls these lectosigns: images that stop being obvious and have to be read, the way Sophie reads her footage.
Watch Calum's spine when Sophie is not in the room. (performance)
With his daughter, Mescal is loose and physically easy. Alone, the body gets difficult: a hand flat against a wall, a back on the night balcony, shoulders that will not settle. He acts in body before face.
Payoff: The performance is built out of what it hides. Everything you need is there in how he carries himself.
Listen to how Sophie talks when older kids are around. (performance)
Frankie Corio, in her first film, plays eleven without performing it. She watches the teenagers at the pool, tries things out, drops them. Wells lets whole scenes run on her unguarded attention.
Payoff: The child is the camera for most of this film. What she notices and what she misses is what you get.
Listen to how little the score tells you. (sound)
Oliver Coates writes drone and extended cello, closer to air pressure than to melody. The pop records do the emotional work instead: karaoke, the resort sound system, songs chosen for 1999 and never winked at.
Payoff: Nothing in the mix instructs you how to feel. The film leaves the reading of every scene up to you.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Read the bodies, not the faces. This film puts what matters into a back, a hand, a posture.