Critics reviews

A brilliantly assured and stylistically adventurous work, this beautifully understated yet emotionally riveting coming-of-age drama picks apart themes of love and loss in a manner so dextrous as to seem almost accidental. Don’t be fooled; Wells knows exactly what she’s doing, and her storytelling is as precise as it is piercing.

She’s [Wells] captured the uncapturable, finding the words and images to describe a feeling that always seems to sit just beyond our comprehension.

Aftersun might be understated but it’s never emotionally restrained. It’s hard to imagine a sequence that could top the film’s emotional climax, set to Queen & David Bowie’s ‘Under Pressure’.

Charlotte Wells is a master of ‘showing’ rather than ‘telling’... ambiguity and the flaws of memory are a big part of this movie, and as is the case with a lot of childhood trauma and grief, we have to live with the fact that we’ll never get the answers we’re looking for.

Rare and special is a film capable of summoning this much poignancy: a feeling which lingers well beyond the film’s final, achingly moving moments on screen.

Deeply personal and profound, Aftersun pulls us into memories both keenly felt and half understood, with real and heart wrenching performances pitched perfectly to linger.

Aftersun understands that closing the inevitable distance between yourself and the ones who raised you is a never-ending pursuit. But every step is a powerful chance to dance with the impossible.

The fragile fabric of memory, rendered in both mist and digital media, is the subject of “Aftersun,” the assured and emotionally complex feature debut of writer-director Charlotte Wells.

Banality emerges, in Aftersun, as one of the purest love languages available to us. You wouldn’t be wrong to wonder why we’re watching any of this — what it is that makes it worth watching at all.

Wells masterfully weaves the past and present together and, though the film doesn’t have any straightforward answers, it’s in the exploration of one’s memory and the reflections that emerge where the drama is at its best.

Aftersun, the debut from Scottish filmmaker Charlotte Wells, is a dual portrait of a girl on the cusp of adolescence and a young man feeling adrift in adulthood, and it’s a work of masterful and almost unbearable melancholy.

Consciousness operates on multiple tracks and "Aftersun" understands this. The multi-level awareness is not in the dialogue, but it's there in the film's gentle rhythms, the editorial choices, the patience and sensitivity of Wells' approach.