Aftersun · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

The image to begin with is a small one: a television, and on its screen the holiday plays back in the smeared colours of 1999 video, and faintly, laid over it, the reflection of the woman watching. You can see both at once — the girl her father is filming, and the adult she became, ghosted on the glass. Charlotte Wells never explains this shot. She doesn't have to. It is the whole film compressed onto a single surface.

Deleuze had a name for an image like this: the crystal-image. Normally we sort what we see into present and past — this is happening now, that was a memory of before. The crystal is the moment those two can no longer be told apart, when a thing and its mirror-image fold together and you stop being able to say which is which. A mirror, a screen, a reflection. Here it is literal. The camcorder footage is the past that really exists, recorded, indexical; the reflection is the present looking; and Wells lays them onto one pane of glass so they circulate, indiscernible.

Most of the film is not that footage, though. The bulk of it — the pool, the buffet, the scuba lesson, Calum's back on the night balcony — is shot clean and wide on digital, and it is not a flashback. A flashback is dated. It announces "this is how it was" and snaps you home. Deleuze called that the recollection-image, and it is exactly what Wells refuses. Blair McClendon's editing has no trigger-object, no softening crossfade, no cue that we are now Remembering. The cuts are abrupt, sometimes rhyming a gesture across twenty years. What we are inside is closer to what Deleuze called the sheets of past: not one dated memory but the whole region of a vanished time, which adult Sophie moves through and rearranges because she cannot simply retrieve it. She is filling the gaps the camcorder left. The film is her doing that work.

Which makes her a particular kind of figure. In the classic movement-image, a character sees a situation and acts to change it. Sophie can do nothing. The holiday is twenty years gone, her father is gone, the footage cannot be cut into a different ending. She can only look and listen. Deleuze called these pure optical and sound situations — opsigns — and the person trapped in them the seer, the voyant: someone who has stopped being an agent and become a watcher who endures. Adult Sophie is the seer in close to its purest form. The entire film is the act of her watching, and being unable to act on what she sees.

Then there is the place the looking goes when it can't bear itself. The strobe-lit nightclub. The rave corridor, where adult Sophie reaches through a crush of dancing bodies toward a figure of her father while the light tears him into fragments. This isn't a memory. Sophie was eleven; she was never in that club. Deleuze would call it a dream-image, an onirosign — a circuit that attaches to no locatable memory but spins off feeling itself. Wells returns to it across the film in pieces of growing length and distress, organised not by chronology but by pressure, until it breaks fully open at the end. It is where grief goes to move, since it cannot go anywhere real.

This is also why the film rewards a second viewing. The first time, much of it reads as ambient: pleasant, drifting, a holiday. On return, everything ambient turns out to be signal — the way Mescal holds his spine, a hand pressed flat to a wall, a goodnight that lands a beat wrong. Deleuze had a word for an image that has lost its obvious action-meaning and instead asks to be read: the lectosign, the readable image. Aftersun is built almost entirely of them. Nothing tells you how to feel. The Oliver Coates score withholds, the camera withholds, the reaction shot you expect never comes, or comes a beat late. You are left deciphering peripheral, involuntary gesture, which is exactly what adult Sophie is doing with the footage.

None of this is invented from nowhere. Wells is writing a chapter in a specific book. From Joanna Hogg's Unrelated and The Souvenir she takes the resort as a pressure-sealed container and the ethics of not resolving — staging over coverage, ambiguity held as a moral position. From Claire Denis's 35 Shots of Rum she takes parent-child love carried in bodies, and a licensed pop song doing the work that talk won't: "Under Pressure" where Denis used "Night Shift." From Lynne Ramsay's Morvern Callar she takes the opaque protagonist read through a period playlist that stands in for an interior we can't enter. Under all of it sits Chris Marker's Sans Soleil and its argument that the camera does not recover memory but manufactures a substitute for it — the philosophical ground of the Hi8 sequences.

What Wells did with these inherited tools was carry the crystal-image into the family drama, the most sentimental genre we have, and strip it of consolation. The film's deepest refusal is moral. It will not decode Calum. It stages his suffering as opaque — his back, the dark balcony, the cut that carries him from social warmth to private unmooring — because to explain him would be to colonise him. Understanding arrives, but too late, and only as an image you can watch and never reach. That is the whole ache of the thing. Wells found a precise form for a feeling everyone has and no film had quite caught: that you can hold the footage in your hands, play it as often as you like, and still not get the person back. Watch it again. This time you'll see he was telling you the whole time.