Aftersun

After watching this beautiful film and coming across a little note from the amazing storyteller Charlotte Wells:

(I cannot share URL apparently so please search "A note from Charlotte Wells from the site of A24.")

This was the word that broke me down. Hasret.

I just couldn't resist my tears. As a Turkish person, its just both amazing and heartbreaking from the point of view of the director that this word resonates with her feelings from a place she had this holiday with her late father. That it stuck with her...

Even though it is not the same case at all, I remember the times as a kid I closed the door on my dad because he would come home late from work. That because he would promise me to come home early.

Now, today I can't even imagine how saddening it was for him at those times and it wasn't even at his hands.

Hopefully I will be able to share my love and gratitude my parents as Charlotte did here with such elegance through some way. Since, it's not easy to recapture feeling this instant or in any...

Thank you for this film all in all, it surely made me reconsider a lot recently...

Aftersun is a film that I wasn't sure I understood when the credits started rolling. Then, as I sat and thought about everything I had seen, I came to believe more and more that it's kind of genius.

What the movie lacks in overt substantive plot it more than makes up for in authenticity and subtle placement of character-building images and dialogue. In the moment, these often feel like tangents and the overall picture isn't clear.

While it can make for a frustrating first viewing, the clarity that comes with the film's final shot suddenly puts everything into perspective and I felt an overwhelming flood of emotion for the two central characters.

Suffering happen more often than not in silence, and it's the cumulative of this film's many quiet moments that drive home one of the most effective, nuanced messages of compassion that I've seen all year.

This is a masterpiece of subtlety, arguably slightly to a fault, but it's refreshing to see it in the age of "hammer over the head" messaging in movies that we're currently living in.

I have two daughters and recently got divorced. I know how it hurts to put on a fake smile while deep inside your heart is bleeding. As a father, a man, you try to look strong and resilient, to keep your children worry-free, but every time the girls are not around you feel like an empty shell. This movie made me cry because I know how it feels to be Callum. I know how hard it is to leave your precious children behind and to be torn away from your family. Leaving behind beautiful memories and slowly drifting apart from your loved ones. It's very hard to move on and I hope to experience better days in the future.

I am only writing this review so I can remember later on why I only gave this movie a 6. I understand that this movie has an extremely powerful and intimate presentation of the relationship between a reckless father and his young daughter. I noticed the intricacies and nuance that the film makers tried to convey throughout. I just did not connect with the film at all. I imagine that this film hit some people hard but for me I was quite bored with it by the end. I have to simply be true to my own feelings and opinions from a film and conclude that to me, it is simply ok. Don't take my rating too seriously because I can genuinely imagine somebody else watching this film thinking that it is the best thing they ever saw.

You have a video of a holiday in the past, when you were young, before life's burdens had amassed, with a father you adore, likes to take to the dancefloor, though he's generally withdrawn and quite downcast. A reflection of a time when eyes were new, interpretation was a seed, as yet to grow, but when you look back now, it's a different world somehow, revealing spaces not yet entered, or sought to go.

It's a slow meander, beautifully filmed, with two incredible performances, although those two highlights alone don't create a piece that takes your breath away as much as you might like, until you sit down to reflect, and absorb what you've seen through your own eyes.