She is shown to be reflecting on the trip to Turkey with her father, by prying through the video camera footage and her own memories, seeking to understand what happened to her father.

Memories real and imagined fill the gaps between as she tries to reconcile the father she knew with the man she didn't.The personalities of the characters are gradually revealed so the audience has a chance to meditate on who they are. I read that she wasn't privy to Mescal's solo scene rehearsals, so that she wasn't fully aware of what his character was going through, much the same as her character Sophie wasn't. The slow pace really gives the viewer time to take in everything, as it's the small details that count here. As a Turkish person, its just both amazing and heartbreaking from the point of view of the director that this word resonates with her feelings from a place she had this holiday with her late father. The succession of placid vignettes of that stay in the hotel in the 90s, seasoned with the inevitable home videos, try to rescue a lost paradise with weak ominous shadows that immerse the viewer in a slow and at times frankly soporific story.

The viewer is invited to join the dots on what has happened between the two timelines and there are several clues that help.

Aftersun also seems an inflection of Afternoon, the halfway division of the day so by extension a pivotal point in Sophie's complicated memories of her dad.

Written and directed by Sophie Wells, AFTERSUN tells the story of Sophie (Frankie Corio) reflecting on a summer holiday with her father (Calum, played by Paul Mescal) 20 years before. Don't take my rating too seriously because I can genuinely imagine somebody else watching this film thinking that it is the best thing they ever saw. At a fading vacation resort in the late 1990s, 11-year-old Sophie (Frankie Corio) treasures rare time together with her loving and idealistic father, Calum (BAFTA winner Paul Mescal, Normal People).Despite the young Sophie's observant nature, she is oblivious to the signs of her father's depression. What really makes this special is that it primarily plays out from the perspective of Sophie, his daughter. AFTERSUN (A) is a quietly devastating British drama from first-time director Charlotte Wells that demonstrates an understanding of cinema you rarely see even in experienced hands. She reflects on a few key moments from the holiday while trying to reconcile the difference between her father when she was 12 years old and the father she has come to know since. Twenty years later, Sophie's tender recollections of their last holiday become a powerful and heartrending portrait of their relationship, as she tries to reconcile the father she knew with the man she didn't, in Charlotte Wells' superb and searingly emotional debut film.