Aftersun

Directed by Charlotte Wells, Aftersun follows Paul Mescal’s Calum as he and his 11-year-old daughter (Frankie Corio’s Sophie) spend time relaxing at a Turkish seaside resort. It’s a small-scale premise that’s employed to predominantly (and distressingly) tedious and underwhelming effect by Wells, as the filmmaker, working from her own screenplay, delivers an aggressively sluggish drama that revolves mostly around Calum and Sophie’s low-key, lackadaisical exploits – with the pervasively aimless atmosphere growing more and more intolerable as time slowly progresses. (The movie is confusingly uneventful, ultimately, and the viewer can’t help but wonder if anything of consequence will ever occur.) The arms-length vibe, which is compounded by the often impenetrable accents, paves the way for a fairly interminable midsection that contains little in the way of character development or actual drama, and it’s worth noting, certainly, that one has completely checked out by the time Wells does offer a few tiny kernels of actual exposition in the thoroughly anticlimactic (and generally endless) third act – which does, in the final analysis, cement Aftersun‘s place as a completely misguided endeavor that could only have worked as a five-minute short.

*1/2 out of ****