Aftersun, review: a beautiful performance from Normal People's Paul Mescal

In this evocative late 90s-set drama, the Irish actor consolidates his position as one of the most gifted actors of his generation

The British Isles are patchily represented in Cannes this year, albeit across far-flung corners of the map: there’s the Cornish oddity Enys Men, the Ireland-set Emily Watson/Paul Mescal drama God’s Children, and another film starring Mescal too, the full-length debut of Scottish writer-director Charlotte Wells. This one, Aftersun, is excellent, a father-daughter drama with an air of mysterious sadness, managing a skilful evocation of going on holiday 20 years ago or more in the Turkish Riviera.

Wells based the film on jaunts with her own father in the late 1990s, when she was just entering adolescence, and at that slightly awkward phase when she was too old to play with mere kids, but too young to hang out with the horny teenagers also at the resort.

As Sophie, this remembered version of herself, she has cast a bright newcomer called Frankie Corio, who has a magically inquisitive quality. She picks up a camcorder often as we watch, training it on her father (Mescal), who is single after a separation we learn little about, and trying to spend quality time with his daughter before she goes the way of all teens.

The film has a beguiling looseness – it captures that familiar holiday feeling of good days and bad days, or moods turning for no particular reason, other than maybe spending a bit too long in each other’s company. In fact, Sophie’s dad has moods within moods, or a general sense of unhappiness he’s protecting her from: when she tries to ask him rather adult questions about his state of mind, he ducks and pes. For her sake, he’s putting on a front, and it’s only in his moments of solitude that the demons creep out. We know already from Normal People what subtlety Mescal, one of the most gifted actors of his generation, is capable of, but his intimations of pain here are beautifully underplayed.

Wells has graduated to this feature after a trio of extremely impressive shorts, including the brilliant Laps (2017), about a woman sexually assaulted on a crowded tube. She has given Aftersun an interesting form with the camcorder footage, but also with brief jumps forward in time, where we spot Sophie’s adult self without fully getting to know her.

As played by the dancer Celia Rowlson-Hall, she’s about the same age in the present day as her dad was, on what we gradually intuit might be their last holiday together. There’s strobe footage of her, and tiny ghostly glimpses of Mescal too, in a nightclub, a location doing metaphorical work for the film’s take on memory: there’s no sign saying “Adulthood” above the door, but this is definitely the idea.

When the younger, more innocent Sophie insists on performing R.E.M.’s Losing My Religion on a free-for-all karaoke night, it might be the most poignantly terrible singing on film since Cameron Diaz murdered Dusty Springfield in My Best Friend’s Wedding. But this one isn’t played for laughs. Stubbornly planted in his seat, though she asked him to duet, her dad just sits there and squirms.

There are great scenes with the older teenagers, goofing off around the pool table, smooching and swearing in Sophie’s presence: acutely recognisable stuff, and a faintly dangerous minefield. A boy of her rough age she beats at arcade games, then makes out with, is a bit of a menace, too. You can pinpoint the time period practically down to the month, in the summer of 1999, when the Macarena was still (just about) a non-ironic dancefloor option, and Blur’s Tender came out – the most recent clue on a soundtrack, curated with very precise care, that will bring holiday memories flooding back for almost anyone over 30.

It’s at some point during Under Pressure at a disco, on the eve of these two characters departing, that you realise what the chorus of that song is telling us about them, boogieing in what is very possibly their last dance, and certainly the end of what once worked in their relationship. It’s a film of such restraint, oblique observation, and poised naturalism that the wallop of this feeling is quite unexpected. It heralds Wells as someone with a Joanna-Hogg-like career path beckoning right ahead, paved by a sensibility all her own.

96 min. Showing at the Cannes Film Festival. A UK release date is tbc