When a Father Is Just Out of Reach
<em>Aftersun </em>charts the exquisite, bittersweet journey of seeing a parent as their own person.
When the writer-director Charlotte Wells began conceiving of , her exquisite debut feature, she didn’t plan to unravel a parent-child dynamic. She simply wanted to observe how any conventional relationship can shift in a new place—so she situated her characters in a resort, outside of their regular routines. But as she looked, for research, through old photo albums of her and her father on holiday, she couldn’t stop thinking about the way her feelings about him had changed since her adolescence. The connection between a parent and a child “has a huge impact on who you are,” she told me earlier this month. “There’s no …” She paused. “I think very few people have a straightforward interpretation of
