Stuck in the Past: On Aftersun, Reflections, and Depression
Aftersun is a reflection.
I originally wrote this piece about Aftersun in February 2023 shortly after I watched the film. It’s one of my Bright Wall Dark Room reject pieces. The theme was “vacation” but I believe the piece stands on its own.
Father and daughter, Calum and Sophie go on Holiday at a Turkish vacation resort. Told through a reflective and mournful Sophie 20 years later, the father and daughter spend their last vacation together. Intercut with the main narrative of the film is miniDV of the vacation and a haunting rave sequence. On the surface, an intimate trip between them; reflected is in the melancholy of memory and the longing for a vacation to never end.
Act I: the vacation as space for reflection
There are two parts to a physical reflection: the light bouncing off the shiny surface and the surface itself. The reflective surface can be many things: a mirror, water, a shiny table. In Aftersun the camera captures these moments of reflection. The image of the gliders slowly dissolves into the upside-down reflection of gliders floating through the sky. Calum and Sophie watch their camcorder videos until it turns off, reflecting them on the TV tube–the very surface that once showed their soon-to-be pixelated memories. Calum is captured doing Tai-Chi in the mirror, with his reflection taking up a slice of the frame while his arm stretches through it. The reflection of his face is captured during a conversation in a restaurant.
It is in these spaces where the melancholia of the vacation is reflected. After a day of scuba diving and lounging at the pool, we see a shot of the paragliders floating in the area. This shot dissolves into their upside-down reflection of the pool, something we know Sophie longs to do, but is too young, as Calum tells her earlier in the film. After this, Sophie and Calum get ready for dinner where they each communicate through their reflection. The shot first holds on an upside-down tilting shot where the frame of the bathroom slowly drifts in. The film cuts back to Sophie, who is upside down looking in the mirror. In this reflective space, the melancholic nature of the vacation seeps into Sophie as she tries to communicate what she feels, “I don’t know. I just feel a bit down or something.” Standing in the bathroom, brushing his teeth, Calum asks, “What do you mean?” His body begins to shift into the main room mirror as the camera continues to tilt down. Once Sophie begins to explain, it shifts to Calum’s perspective, where Sophie can be seen in the corner of the mirror.
“I don’t know. Don’t you ever feel like you’ve just done a whole amazing day, and then you come home and feel tired and down, and…feels like your bones don’t work. They’re just tired and everything is tired. Like you’re sinking.” On those last words of Sophie describing her emotions, the camera pans to Calum’s reflection in the mirror, lost in his own bit of melancholy as Sophie has describes his own depression that is associated with the trip. “I don’t know. It’s weird,” she says. Cal chokes down his own ghosts, words that he can’t seem to speak, and tells of what vacation is supposed to be “We’re here to have a good time, aye?” He spits his toothpaste at his reflection, an aggressive gesture that tells of his own internal struggles, demons he can’t put to rest, that the space of that vacation seems to only exaggerate with its highs and lows.
Calum looks inward like this throughout the trip, paralyzed by the moment but also by its fleetingness. In the space of the vacation, Calum finds himself in reflection, wishing for it to last forever as Sophie does. Why else would he have bought the camera to record the memories? It seems new as the Panasonic box sits on the hotel dresser. But in these moments, Calum also reflects on something else, something more sinister than their sun-soaked reverie. Calum reflects on his life. He is ever-stuck in the past, which taints his present. Is the state of melancholia not one of infinite reflection?
Act II: the rave as space for lost futures
Beneath Calum’s reflection is the hole of depression. The black void of the rave he wants to go back to. He even asks Sophie to tell him about her exploits when she gets older. The drugs she does, people she’s with, parties she goes to—anything, he says. Calum’s rave sensibilities are on full display. He doesn’t sing, but he will dance. The rave has already been shown as the down under as the camera moves from the darkness of night in the bed, to the deep dark of the dance floor. The rave, the underground, a collective experience, a reflection of its own hellish landscape. A reaction to the neoliberal turn.
He represents the generation of the “lost futures.” The ravers who once had everything: community, fun, dancing, drugs. Calum is the raver of Mark Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life. The character interspersed throughout Fisher’s text is stuck in the present, which is constantly made up of the past, with no more thoughts of the future. He is now alone, stuck in the void.
Fisher describes rave music as “a music saturated with affect, but the affect involved wasn’t associated with romance or introspection,” (173). That is, there is no reflection when you are on the dance floor; there is only the moment. And it wasn’t until “The introspective turn in 21st century (post)dance music was therefore not a turn towards emotion, it was a shift from collectively experienced affect to privatised emotions,” (173). Calum no longer has the collective sense of affect, only the emotional introspection, the reflection of that affect, which now plagues him. He is the subject of the lost future, who, through the neoliberal privatization of everything–even the way one experiences music, can no longer see through the thick smog of what used to be.
Rave music itself is a reflection of the past, made up of samples of old hits and long-lost records. Infinite beats that feel never-ending. With a connection to drugs, rave represents another kind of “going on a trip” where the vacation stands for getting high. The thrill of a new space, feelings of joy, a feeling on the midpoint of a vacation where it may never end.
But with the great highs is the low of coming down. Sophie, unaware of the comedown as a child, sees her father struggle with it. When you’ve come down too many times, as it seems Calum has, at the greatest high you already project yourself into the future, knowing it cannot last forever, falling into depression.
He can hardly imagine the future. Moments before scuba diving, talking with the instructor on the boat, he exalts “I can’t see myself at 40, to be honest. Surprised I made it to 30.” With deep breaths Calum takes in the moment, his face being cut off in the frame as the camera looks off into the distance, taking on the natural movement of the boat bobbing in water. The film cuts to Sophie on the miniDV tape, talking to the camera.
A similar feeling is expressed later as the father and daughter record themselves in the hotel room, with the camera hooked up to the tube TV. In the left corner of the frame, you can see them pop in and out of the mirror while the rest of them are shown through the tube TV from the pixelated camera.
Sophie gives a brief tour of their beds before she asks Calum how the camera zooms. After which Cal can be seen on the TV and in the reflection of the TV where the sun hits, creating a double-view of him. In this set-up she “interviews” him, a moment that is seen in the opening montage, “When you were 11, what did you think you would be doing now?” Cal looks at the camera displeased, but trying to remain calm he turns away to continue folding laundry. After he tells Sophie to turn the camera off and when she doesn’t, Calum rips the AVC cable out of the TV. Now in the TV, only silhouettes of their reflection are seen. They sit on the bed, Cal’s face reflected in the corner of the mirror.
At this moment, the reflections are too deep to sit with, forcing Cal into a space he doesn’t want to go. Sophie replies to Cal’s story, “That's a bit…deep.” In these reflections Calum’s depression creeps in, taking him to places he doesn’t want to go, and behaving in ways he doesn’t want to behave. The composition of the scene obscures the surface of vacation, the space that is meant to be bliss, and forces the spectator to look beneath the surface of these characters and into their ghosts.
After these moments the film is filled with times when Calum’s ghosts come back to haunt him. Later on he somberly tells Sophie that “[She] has time” to figure out how she wants to be and where she wants to live, something he wasn’t afforded or has forgotten since he is stuck in the ever-present of depression, the continual reflection. Stuck in the past, Cal becomes irritable with Sophie at the karaoke, something he is no longer up for, forcing her to do it alone. After the fight, Cal sits in the hotel room alone, reliving memories of the vacation before it is even over. He mourns the end of the vacation, like a raver who knows they will eventually come down. Captured in the reflection of the mirror, he can no longer handle his depression.
Act III: the camera as a tool for reflection
The rest of the film is a haze of depression. Sophie does everything she can to cheer Cal up, even getting a group of strangers to wish him a happy birthday. This moment leads to a dissolve of the previous night where Cal cries, alone, in the dark. Older Sophie wakes from the dream of the rave, where she searches for her father. The spectator, now with her in the present lives a few more moments of the vacation as it comes to an end. There is the image of vacation we see (the image) and the reality reflected by it (what lies beneath the image). What better represents this than, during their last dinner, a man taking a Polaroid of them? Sophie says, “wish we could have stayed for longer” and the film cuts to Polaroid, memories of the vacation slowly developing on the piece of film. If a memory is a recollection of a moment in time, then the camera is the technology that can capture time and preserve the memory's physical presence.
This appears as Sophie, older, watches the old miniDV tape from her and her father’s last trip. There is also the reflection of the rave. Sophie looks for her father, but the rave is also a reflection of her father’s past. What is found beneath the reflection is the reflected, the face, the reality. As Sophie watches the vacation videos, she discovers that her father is not as he seemed, but that he was always a ghost. She stares at him through the telephone box, as he sleeps naked, as he dances, and now, through the pixelated fuzz of their last memories, he is even harder to reach.
She is now able to reflect on the past, the captured past, the real and the imaginary, and suture the gaps in her memory, revealing the reflections that we have seen in the mirrors and screens all along throughout the film, her father’s depression. Beneath the reflections, she finds that her father was always under pressure–the song of their last dance. A euphoric, yet melancholic sequence where Sophie searches for her father in the rave.
In Sophie’s present, the camera pans from her TV to her apartment, filled with stereo equipment, she sits and watches until the camera lands on a record player. The fuzz of the miniDV is like the crackle of the vinyl. Crackle is a way of experiencing the past in the present. Sophie hangs on to the old, the ideas of music experienced collectively through stereo instead of individually through headphones. She has the rug, something her father toiled over purchasing, one element of class woven throughout the film. They had to stay in the hotel across the street from the resort. Young Sophie knew at that moment that, even then, her father did not have money for singing lessons or anything else he promised her. She recognizes the struggle of class in the present, something vacation puts on the surface. Where you stay, where you eat, what you buy, what you can do is all dictated by money. She comes face to face with her father’s class status as surplus, moving from job to job, idea to idea, imbuing him with neoliberal precarity which feeds his demons with what Fisher calls “collective depression.”
Calum is haunted by the ghosts of his reflections until he becomes a ghost in Sophie’s own reflections. Ghosts not only haunt the present from a position of the past, but they also prevent you from moving to the future, that is, until you make peace with the specter. This is what Sophie is doing in her reliving of their last time together. She dives into the atmosphere of the rave. The moment where her father is stuck, dancing endlessly. The vacation space of euphoric bliss. She wants to live in these moments of affect forever; memories captured by the camera that can never fade. She fades in and out of her reverie of their summer, of the rave where her father’s ghost still dances, of her memories and their own lost future.
Thinking about this film again in 2025 I wanted to leave you with a brief excerpt from Harper Cleves, who wrote a review for the Socialist Party of Ireland:
“As Marxists, it is these stories in the lives of ordinary people that are at the beating heart of our struggle for a better existence. A potential future exists in which the Callums of this world meet their grandchildren; in which the Sophies make countless memories with their fathers. That’s a world worth fighting for; one in which our talents, and joys can find their fullest expression – and our love also.”