Aftersun has captured — and continues to express — a generation’s ennui

By Sriman Narayanan

In lowercase letters, we text on our iPhones —- those objects that get thinner, lighter, more unmarked, with each passing year. It’s cool to be understated, after all. Just ask NBA marketing departments, who boil disappear formerly complex dinosaurs into further “creative” negative space, much to millennial chagrin. Or better yet, ask any kid on a college campus, because odds are half our wardrobes are stuck in earth tones.

Understatement has defined Generation Z. It's become the language we understand the world through. Grandeur isn’t much of an option for my people — and I will claim them as mine, I feel I have little community, no religion, no fandom, that comes close to the shared spiritual ennui of my peers, shaped by waning attention spans, absurd screen times — because I fear we’re too smart to be earnest. We know too much.

I heard about Aftersun much, much earlier than I watched it. I actually literally heard the film first, before I even knew who Paul Mescal was, before I was inundated by countless reactions that boiled down to “crying, screaming, throwing up,” because TikTok had circulated an audio clip from the film into my For You page.

In the clip, Young Sophie says to her father, Callum, “I think it’s nice that we share the same sky.” It fit snugly into what was becoming a tragic theme on the platform, in music, in literature, in film — these singular lines that condensed otherwise incomprehensible emotions, the human reaction to being pulled into every separate human’s direction on our screens, into the most basic language: I think it’s nice. (Bo Burnham’s “the whole world at your fingertips, the ocean at your door” falls in league as well). The line is nice, but welts under the pressing truth of the narrative it’s pulled from: that Sophie doesn’t always get to be with her father as her parents are separated. The only thing they can share, physically, is the sky.

By the end of Charlotte Wells’s feature debut, I am entirely broken. After being swallowed by the sterile white of its final shot, I struggle to articulate why.

The film is incredibly sparse; it breathes, it insists upon allowing itself to breathe. It reminds me of an album that’s been similarly TikTok-ified for beatifying purposes, Frank Ocean’s Blonde, whose lack of drums has left some entranced by its bonelessness, has left others angered by its spinelessness. Yes, Aftersun is quite boneless. There’s little to grab onto besides those tiny bookends of Sophie staring back into the camera Callum once held with his one capable hand. And maybe that’s all the film is.

Some space, however, draws attention to itself. And some space asks to be filled. 

Aftersun is a film that cannot be separated from the way it is consumed, because its very construction seems to ask its viewer to take on the role of the filler.

That role can be executed in many ways. Quite a few needle drops to comparatively analyze against the screenplay. What does it mean for an 11-year-old to sing something as barely explicit as R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion”? What does it mean that her father refuses to join her? What does it mean to center a film on Queen’s “Under Pressure”? To deliver that track’s, and the film’s, emotional climax inside a limbonic rave whose anachronism feels like something about the act of making the movie itself? 

But perhaps there is a more serious question Aftersun asks of its viewer. I feel called forth by the film with a grip that few films have successfully hooked me with — to consider myself. In what pockets of my absence did my parents cry? Who were they when they weren’t with me? They are not entirely original questions, but Aftersun seems aware of this fact. The film’s understatement doesn’t insist upon this question. Like any one of us men who can’t bring himself to admit he might be depressed. Who’ll scroll through his For You page, secretly double-tap on a clip of Callum and Sophie, before he continues to scroll.

Its sparseness of narrative structure seems to emphasize its interest in the work of return, of turning back to what one was with what one is. Callum and adult Sophie’s brawl in the rave is literally that. A film this sun-soaked is figuratively that. This film is not dominantly focused on watching Sophie return to her youth. It’s literally just her youth.

That sort of space allows for what the film’s response has been. A search for “I think it’s nice” on TikTok returns the most gorgeous clips of sunsets shot on cinema cameras, cropped for vertical viewing, tied to a song, most often “retire (final)” by Alvedon, all patched underneath captions for Sophie and Callum’s seconds-long exchange about the sky. 

Aftersun trusts its viewers to do with it what they need. This is rather revolutionary, I think. But it requires a generation insistent upon finding in films what they need them to be for us. They are partners. I love my people, because I believe they have the strength to ask films to be what we need of them.

Susan Sontag wrote, in her essay “Against Interpretation,” that in lieu of the existing structure of academic engagement of art, of hermeneutics, we are may need to search for an “erotics of art.” That act demands two dancers, though, and I believe, with Aftersun, we may have found them.