To dissect a memory is an act of spectral vivisection. You incise a past that can no longer bleed, you search for vital organs in a body made of ectoplasm, you attempt to diagnose a melancholy whose causes are long buried under layers of time. "Aftersun" by Charlotte Wells is not a film about memory; it is a cinematic séance, a desperate and sublime attempt to evoke a ghost—that of a father—not to interrogate him, but simply to see him one more time, to decipher the cracks in his mask of normality through the grainy tape of a MiniDV camcorder.

The film's entire formal apparatus is a statement of intent of disarming lucidity. The adult Sophie, a figure almost entirely off-screen of whom we perceive only an observing consciousness, is not simply remembering her last holiday in Turkey with her young father, Calum. She is re-examining the evidence. The home-video footage, with its washed-out colours and coarse grain typical of the ‘90s, is not a nostalgic affectation but an archaeological artifact. Wells, with a directorial intelligence that instantly places her among the purest talents in contemporary cinema, treats it like the Zapruder film of a soul: she slows it down, freezes it, scrutinizes it, searching in an out-of-focus gesture or an overly tight smile for the clue that, at eleven years old, she had missed. In this, "Aftersun" aligns less with the cinema of nostalgia and more with that of posthumous investigation, entering into an ideal dialogue with Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil, where the image is a trace, an emotional hieroglyph to be deciphered. The crucial difference is that while Marker sought the mechanics of collective memory, Wells seeks the key to understanding a single, inaccessible inner universe.

Paul Mescal delivers a performance that is a masterpiece of subtraction. His Calum is not a manifestly tormented father. He is affectionate, protective, at times awkwardly boyish, a thirty-year-old trying to be a responsible parent while battling demons that we, like the young Sophie, can only glimpse. They are flashes, fractures in the ordinary: a solitary, desperate dance on the threshold of his room, a silent, unseen cry on the bed, a gaze lost in the void while his daughter sleeps. Mescal does not perform depression; he embodies its aura. His physicality, often captured in postures that suggest an internal struggle—the Tai Chi on the balcony as an attempt to impose balance, the cast on his arm as a symbol of a deeper, invisible wound—is a text in its own right. Beside him, the debuting Frankie Corio is a revelation. Her performance is not that of a child prodigy who "acts," but that of a developing human being who observes. Her gaze is our own, a mixture of filial adoration and a dawning, uneasy awareness that the adult before her is as much an enigma as she is to herself.

The film’s narrative structure is elliptical, almost Proustian in its progression through associations, through visual and sonic madeleines. An image from the present (the rug Calum bought in Turkey) triggers the plunge into the past. But unlike Proust, the time regained in "Aftersun" leads not to the consolation of understanding, but to the perennial frustration of incompleteness. It is a work that shares the poetics of the unsaid with the short stories of Raymond Carver, where the greatest weight resides in the white spaces between words, in the silences between father and daughter by the poolside. The Turkish tourist resort, a "non-place" par excellence, becomes the perfect stage for this intimate drama: a liminal, suspended space, where the normal structures of daily life are absent and fragilities can more easily emerge, like salt crystallizing on the skin after a swim in the sea.

Wells places her story in a specific historical and cultural context, that of the late ‘90s, without ever fetishizing it. The soundtrack, which ranges from Blur to Catatonia to the summer hit "Macarena," is not a simple nostalgic jukebox. It is the sonic fabric of an era, the last gasp of a certain pre-millennium, pre-9/11 optimism. The key track, "Under Pressure" by Queen and David Bowie, is used in a sequence that is the film’s pulsating, heartbreaking core. In a nightclub, strobe lights fragment bodies and faces, and in these intermittent flashes, the adult Sophie imagines seeing her father, trapped in an eternal, desperate dance. It is here that the diegetic gap between past and present collapses. Memory is no longer a film to be rewatched, but a psychological space to be inhabited, a dark and feverish rave where the daughter tries to reach and save a father who can no longer be saved. The use of the song's lyric ("This is our last dance") has an almost unbearable emotional power, an example of how cinema can transcend the literal to achieve a purely poetic and emotional truth.

This stroboscopic space is the perfect metaphor for the film itself: a fragmented vision of a loved one, at times blinding and at times dark. "Aftersun" tells us that we can never completely know another human being, especially a parent seen through the eyes of a child. We can only gather the fragments, the Polaroids that were never developed, the silences, the songs sung at the top of our lungs on a tour bus. The film is a radical act of love precisely because it accepts this impossibility. Sophie does not try to "solve" the mystery of her father, nor does Wells offer easy psychological explanations for his pain. The etiology of his suffering remains off-screen, like a sun too bright to be looked at directly. What remains is the impression he left, the residual heat on the skin after the sun has set—the aftersun of the title.

The ending, with that wave through the glass of an airport gate that transforms into a definitive farewell, is of a heart-rending composure. It is the closing of the circle, the acceptance that the dark corridor glimpsed in the nightclub is Calum's final destination, a place where Sophie can never follow. What she is left with is not a complete story, with a beginning, a middle, and an end, but a collection of precious and painful moments. "Aftersun" is a miraculous debut, a film that gets under your skin and stays there, like an echo, like the ghost of a melody. It is a silent elegy that redefines the coming-of-age story, transforming it into a work of emotional archaeology, proving that the most powerful films are not those that give us answers, but those that teach us to live with the beauty and the pain of our own unresolved questions.