A directorial debut of staggeringly impressive form with a wallop of an ending, Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun completely broke me. Following Paul Mescal and Frankie Corio as father and daughter, respectively, they take a holiday to a resort in Turkey where tenderness and pain converge. Picked up by A24 for a release next month after stopping by the 60th New York Film Festival, they’ve now released the first trailer for the Cannes winner.
Rory O’ Connor said in his review, “Aftersun is a triumph, both a rich sensory experience and impossibly sad. It’s also one of the best debuts to play at the Cannes Film Festival in years, selected in the Critic’s Week sidebar, where it won the jury prize. It stars Frankie Corio, a great find, and Paul Mescal, an actor who continues to find new shades on the sweet, emotionally stunted young men that have become his signature. (His Edinburgh accent here, I have been told, is dead on.) In Aftersun, Mescal—who convinced as a teenager in Normal People just two years ago—is tasked with playing a father for the first time. Of course, his age is not insignificant for the role: Wells’ film is a meditation on the warring forces of youth and responsibility that might have caused him, and perhaps her own father, to unravel.”
See the trailer below.
Aftersun opens on October 21.