'Aftersun' review: Paul Mescal is a movie dad for the ages in Charlotte Wells' stunningly handsome debut

A stunning start that expands with the progressive poignancy of a Polaroid, Charlotte Wells' "Aftersun" is not just an honest film about how we remember the people we've lost - fragmented, elusive, nowhere and everywhere all at once - it's also a mind-boggling act of self-remembering. Here, over the course of an oblique but tender story that seems small enough to fit on an instant photo (or slip into the LCD screen of an old camcorder), Wells creates a film that gradually echoes far beyond its executives. As it climaxed with Freddie Mercury's biggest needle drop this side of "Wayne's World," "Aftersun" began to shake with the crushing weight of all we can't leave behind, and all that we may not have known to take with us in the first place.

When Sophie (remarkable newcomer Frankie Corio, As Real As It Gets) thinks of her dad, she thinks of the Turkish vacation they spent together in the late 90s. 11, and Calum — played by "Normal People" breakout Paul Mescal, who makes a premature leap into dad roles with enormous poise and a triggering sense of parenting mystery — turned 32. Some kids in their ramshackle hotel assumed they were siblings, and now they would be around the same age.

As an adult whom we only see in snatches, Sophie reviews the MiniDV footage she and Calum recorded over that vacation, eagerly scanning the standard-definition video for clues a child might have. could miss. Clues to what? It doesn't matter.

The eerily objective home videos and semi-imaginary 35mm scenes that "Aftersun" wraps around them both suggest that Calum was battling a demon of one ray or another, and that he was doing his best to hide this struggle from his daughter during their all-too-rare time together, but Wells denies us the details. Like Sophie, all we can do is search for meaning amidst the rubble and hope to bridge the haunted spaces between the man she once knew and the man she lost.

"After Sun"

We tend to think of memories as crystallized moments, loosely chained along the lattices of a chandelier falling somewhere deep within our minds. And yet, personal experience tells us that our pasts are made up of a...