By Emma Cordonatto-Hara
Edited by Natalie Hrga and Olivia Wigod
Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun (2022) opens with a camcorder video taken by eleven-year-old Sophie during a summer holiday at a Turkish resort with her father, Calum. While the clumsy, handheld footage first situates the film in a child’s point of view, brief shots of Sophie as an adult quickly reveal that the narrative interweaves two temporalities and perspectives. As present-day Sophie revisits the footage from that summer, the film unfolds through her attempt to reconcile with the memory of a father she never knew completely. While Aftersun’s meditation on grief knits together past and present, the film also experiments with another kind of temporality by depicting Sophie’s queer childhood—a queerness that, while not overtly significant in the narrative, still invites attention. In queer theory, the term queer temporality refers to the way queer lives do not conform to heterosexual narratives of time that prioritize milestones like marriage and parenthood. By examining the film’s fragmented temporality, this paper explores Aftersun’s portrayal of queer adolescence through its narrative structure, Sophie’s retrospective gaze, and the camcorder’s mediation. As meaning emerges through moments of lingering and revisiting, I argue that the film depicts Sophie’s queer girlhood as a space that disrupts linear time to embrace the fragmentary nature of memory and identity, ultimately resisting the constraints of a heteronormative timeline that values only constant speed, progress, and productivity.
The film’s setting within the confines of the vacation space plays a key role in the disruption of linear time. Although Sophie and Calum’s conversations allows us to piece together some clues, we know little about their lives outside the resort. The vacation is a time in which real life seems to pause—everything is suspended and unhurried, free from the usual pressures of productivity. In her book The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century, Kathryn Bond Stockton uses the term “growing sideways” to illustrate how queer time involves delay and non-linear development. Stockton argues that queer children do not grow “up” in a progressive path toward adulthood but rather grow “outwards,” expanding into a wide set of experiences (11). She writes that “sideways growth” is “something that locates energy, pleasure, vitality, and (e)motion in the back-and-forth of connections and extensions that are not reproductive” ( 13). In essence, queer time finds fulfillment in experiences that do not necessarily build on one another towards a specific goal; it resists the narrative of constant forward motion, instead embracing a lateral movement that opens up alternative connections and possibilities. The film stages a setting where time seems to swell, reflecting the slowness of growing sideways.
Aftersun also portrays slowness through cinematic form. In Queer Girls, Temporality and Screen Media: Not “Just a Phase,” Whitney Monaghan explores how formal elements in film contribute to enacting a queer temporality. She touches on Karl Schoonover’s work about the politics of slow cinema, in which he argues that queerness “often looks a lot like wasted time, wasted lives, wasted productivity” (qtd. in Monaghan 20-21). While speed and movement are typically associated with childhood and growth, slowness disrupts heteronormative timelines grounded in ideas of progress. Furthermore, as Monaghan argues, the use of static cameras and long takes—which Wells employs extensively in her film—slow down the viewer’s perception of time (22). The camera passively records mundane events that unfold throughout Sophie and Calum’s stay, such as phone conversations or evenings at the hotel, creating the sensation of slowness for the viewer. For instance, toward the end of the film, a shot captures a Polaroid developing in real time over the course of forty seconds while the two reflect on their holiday coming to an end. The long take dilates the viewer’s sense of time, while the photograph, which captures the characters on the final evening of their vacation, frames the moment through nostalgia. The first time we see the characters at the pool, Calum holds the camcorder and says, “see, if you let it rest on an object for a wee while, it gets the lighting right.” The film invites us to linger and immerse ourselves within the image, rejoicing in the “wasted time” that allows us to notice subtleties in lighting, movement, or sound.
Moreover, Wells achieves slowness through the absence of climactic events, aligning narrative structure with queer temporality. As Monaghan argues, “heteronormative temporal logics valorise linear and progressive life narratives; lives marked by a particular set of celebrated milestones” (14). Rather than depicting Sophie’s experience at the resort through classic milestones of girlhood, Wells often portrays her on the sidelines, observing an adolescent world in which she does not quite belong. She first encounters the older kids in the bathroom, where she overhears the girls talking about their sexual experiences. As she peers through the stall’s keyhole, the camera adopts her perspective, framing one of the girls’ descriptive hand gestures directly through the small opening. In a later scene, Sophie plays pool with the older kids until a couple starts kissing. A boy tries to cover her eyes, but the camera, adopting Sophie’s gaze, catches glimpses of the kiss through the gaps in his hand. In both instances, the keyhole and the boy’s hands partially obscure the frame, visually depicting a world that feels distant and out of reach. By positioning Sophie as an observer, the film departs from a traditional coming-of-age narrative that follows heteronormative milestones of development.
Further into the film, Sophie gets lost at night and runs into Michael, the boy with whom she played arcade games. Michael takes her to a pool where he awkwardly kisses her, while Sophie, seemingly uninterested by his kiss, looks down at the water reflecting other kids peering at them. In the next scene, she returns to the hotel and inadvertently sees two of the boys she was playing with earlier kissing. The dark, quiet surroundings frame this moment as intimate, yet the camera aligns with Sophie’s perspective as she observes this private act of queer intimacy. The film links the two scenes thematically through close proximity in the narrative, drawing attention to Sophie’s experience as she navigates between heteronormative expectations and the possibility of a queer alternative. Ultimately, these moments of observation allow for a suspension of the narrative, as if time itself were still. In her piece, Stockton describes the experience of queer childhood as “hanging in suspense—even wishing time would stop, or just twist sideways, so that one wouldn’t have to advance to new or further scenes of trouble” (3). More simply, sideways growth represents a longing to slow down and step outside the linear timelines imposed by societal norms. Aftersun’s slow narrative structure fully immerses us in Sophie’s perspective, as it forces us to wait and observe by withholding any kind of climactic resolution. In this way, Wells juxtaposes the joy of wasted time that delights in slowness with the melancholy of stillness, conveyed through Sophie’s quiet act of watching.
Sophie’s position as an observer allows the film to interlace past and present, disrupting, once again, a heteronormative temporal logic. As mentioned earlier, the film opens through the camcorder’s lens. Sophie films her father in the hotel room, and while the video freezes on Calum, the reflection of adult Sophie watching television overlaps onto the frame. The footage then becomes pixelated, signaling that she is fast-forwarding the video. This opening sequence therefore establishes the film as framed through Sophie’s retrospective gaze, layering past and present temporalities. In Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Roland Barthes contemplates the essence of photography in light of his grief for his late mother. He reflects on what it means to look back at these images, which, by nature, capture past moments that once belonged to the present. He describes the photograph as “not to restore what has been abolished (by time, by distance) but to attest that what I see has indeed existed” (82). In a similar way, the camcorder is a direct witness to the events it captures, and videos serve as material traces of the past. Yet, as Barthes argues, photographs also represent “a reality one can no longer touch,” and are thus inherently tied to feelings of loss and mourning (87). They haunt the present by depicting moments to which we cannot return. But as Sophie revisits the footage and grieves the time spent with her father, one can interpret the other scenes that constitute the diegesis as her attempt to piece her memories together. Childhood memories take on even deeper meaning in retrospect, because adults do not tell children everything; it is a time that is fragmentary, where certain truths remain hidden. Through this act of looking back, and inward, adult Sophie experiences girlhood from a distance, navigating its temporal gaps by pausing, rewinding, and fast-forwarding.
This act of rewatching creates a fragmented narrative structure that parallels the non-linearity of queer temporality. As Monaghan argues, queer time can be conveyed through flashbacks and flashforwards, which serve to juxtapose distinct temporalities (22). During the opening sequence, as the video fast-forwards, flashes of Calum dancing at a rave appear—it is unclear whether these moments depict a real event (and thus function as prolepses) or arise from Sophie’s imagination. Regardless, the scene reappears four more times throughout the film, drawing attention to the temporal fragmentation within the narrative. Additionally, Monaghan writes that “shots may be structured to highlight different perspectives of a single moment, expressing the temporality of the ‘meanwhile’” (22). The film presents two overlapping perspectives: Sophie looking through the camcorder display screen, and adult Sophie rewatching these images years later. Midway through the film, there is a scene in which Sophie connects the camcorder to the television in the hotel room. The camera is positioned at a slight angle in front of it, allowing us to see both what the camcorder is filming and the reflection of Sophie holding the device in the mirror behind the television. As the scene progresses, it becomes clear that this is part of the opening sequence but viewed from a different perspective. Calum appears on the television but is also reflected on its screen, echoing the start of the film. As the scene destabilizes the film’s temporality and prompts the viewer to reconsider the chronology of events, it confirms that the narrative is filtered through adult Sophie’s point of view.
The revisitation of the same moment from another perspective allows the viewer to notice previously overlooked details. For instance, Sophie’s question, “When you were eleven, what did you think you would be doing now?” takes on a deeper resonance the second time we encounter this scene, as it references an earlier moment in the film when Calum tells the diving instructor that he was surprised to have even made it to thirty. This mirrors Barthes’ concept of the punctum, which refers to the small, incidental detail in a photograph that evokes a strong emotional response in the observer (27). In “Imaging Grief and Loss: Laura Mulvey’s Death 24× a Second as Film-Philosophy,” Backman Rogers writes how “[t]he punctum does not come about through human agency at the time of the image’s registration, but its significance can only be noted by the human eye in retrospect” (15). Furthermore, the idea that meaning unfolds gradually through layers of revisitation and reinterpretation reflects Sophie’s protoqueerness. In her analysis, Stockton writes about the “protogay child,” which relies on a retrospective process: it refers to the way a queer child’s identity as “queer” only becomes apparent in hindsight, when they are revealed not to be straight (6). Thus, Aftersun’s depiction of Sophie’s retrospective gaze evokes not only Barthes’s punctum but also Stockton’s notion of queer temporality, inviting one to interpret the past anew through revisitation.
In his contemplation of photographs of his deceased mother, Barthes associates the punctum with the awareness of death that a picture can evoke. In Chapter 39, he reflects on a photograph by Alexander Gardner depicting a man in a cell awaiting execution; he writes, “the punctum is: he is going to die. I read at the same time: This will be and this has been” (Barthes 96). The photograph simultaneously evokes past and present as it depicts someone who has already died, while also providing an uncanny feeling of premonition that their death is inevitable. Likewise, in Aftersun, the camera captures Sophie and Calum’s lives while subtly pointing to the inevitability of mortality. Although never explicitly stated, the film subtly suggests the possibility of Calum’s death in the near future after the vacation, evoking the same temporal tension Barthes describes. The gritty, textured quality of the camcorder contributes to the haunting quality of a life that is distant, accessible only through memory or technological apparatuses. It heightens our awareness that what we see is not the present, but a mediated version of the past. As death permeates both the film’s narrative and its form, Aftersun constructs a temporality that resists forward momentum, unsettling the linear time structured around reproductivity.
Moreover, the camcorder’s mediation allows us to engage with these moments through a different temporal lens, such as by pausing the film. As Backman Rogers reminds us, the moving image is composed of a series of still frames (11). Thus, she argues, “[t]hrough its very structure and inception, the cinematic image is intrinsically connected to stillness and its connotations of haunting, memory, and mortality” (13). In Aftersun, Wells employs the freeze frame twice: the first, as previously discussed, occurs during the opening sequence, while the second takes place in the final sequence, when Sophie waves goodbye to her father in the airport. After the frame freezes on Sophie, the camera pans to the opposite side of the television, revealing her adult self sitting in her living room. The pan continues until it smoothly transitions back to Calum at the airport, who is holding the camcorder. The scene seamlessly blends the two temporalities together while exemplifying Backman Rogers’ claim that “[s]tillness, then, interrupts the narrative drive: it prevents the action from being propelled forward” (16). Despite our awareness of present-day Sophie, the two freeze frames at the start and end of the film make the vacation space feel more self-contained. The film suspends the narrative, embodying both the stillness of death and the stillness of queer time.
To conclude, Aftersun reconfigures our linear relationship with time to quietly create space for Sophie’s queer girlhood. Wells’ film slows us down in our tracks, offering alternative ways of existing in a world that only celebrates heteronormative ideals of progress. By layering the past and the present, depicting the temporal gaps within Sophie’s memories and the camcorder videos, the film resists a linear narrative that aligns with conventional ideas of growth. This refusal to follow a traditional coming-of-age storyline structured around predefined milestones opens up a more expansive space for girlhood to be experienced. Sophie’s retrospective gaze lingers in the details that hold emotional significance, finding meaning in what might otherwise be dismissed as “wasted time.” Furthermore, the film’s use of the camcorder—a nostalgic object that both preserves and distances us from the past—imbues the narrative with the stillness of mortality, reflecting queerness’ resistance to a social order that values children as beacons of the future. In this way, Aftersun gently invites us into Sophie’s sideways growth, asking us to be patient and attend to the mundane, until it reveals its magic—or until the lighting is just right.
Works Cited
Backman Rogers, Anna. “Imaging Grief and Loss: Laura Mulvey’s Death 24x a Second as
Film-Philosophy.” De Arte, vol. 50, no. 92, 2015, pp. 11–18.
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard
Howard, Pbk. ed, Hill and Wang, 2010.
Monaghan, Whitney. “Just a Phase.” Queer Girls, Temporality and Screen Media: Not ‘Just a Phase,’ Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, pp. 1–25.
Stockton, Kathryn Bond. “Introduction: Growing Sideways, or Why Children Appear to Get Queerer in the Twentieth Century.” The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century, Duke University Press, 2009, pp. 1–17.
Wells, Charlotte, director. Aftersun. A24, 2022.
Feature Photo
Frankie Corio (R) and Paul Mescal (L) in Aftersun, 2022. FROM A24/EVERETT COLLECTION.