Name: Why Aftersun is a Masterpiece | *Spoilers*
Uploaded: 2025-04-28T14:24:23.000Z
Duration: 17 min 29 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Good evening, this is the Oscar Expert here, and it's time to talk about After Sun in depth with spoilers.

To-infinitive

I've seen it twice now, I have a lot to say about a movie that I feel is a masterpiece.

This video has no regard for spoilers, it is not intended for you to watch it if you haven't seen the movie, and I would hate for this video to be what spoils the movie for you.

So to give a quick sum up, After Sun is about a woman reflecting on a vacation that she had with her father two decades ago when she was 11 years old, and there's clearly joy and love in their connection, but there's also this tension or pressure beneath the surface that's slowly building up that stems from the dad's mental health issues that he's quietly dealing with.

By the end, this fairly languid film becomes deeply painful as we learn that this vacation was the last time that these two ever saw each other.

It's implied that Kalem committed suicide after this vacation, leaving Sophie with just memories and video footage to pour over and piece together who he was and what she couldn't see in him before.

It's very clear that Kalem is quietly dealing with depression throughout their vacation.

Moments in the beginning where he slides out the back door for a cigarette while Sophie is sleeping and does this dance paints a portrait of a man trying to ease his mind.

The same goes for the father's interest in Tai Chi.

We see that he's bought several books on it and he practices often.

Sophie just thinks in the moment that he's just doing his goofy ninja moves, which speaks to the separation that exists between who Sophie thought that she was looking at and who she was really looking at.

Him saying he doesn't know how he made it to 30 and doesn't think he can make it to 40.

Kalem's mental state is pretty half-sketched, but I think that's very intentional.

We get some clues as to why he might be feeling this way, but we don't ever fully understand it because we only are given as many clues as Sophie has, which makes sense considering that this entire movie is from Sophie's perspective.

And also, sometimes mental illness and depression don't even have a clear source that you can point to.

Kalem is a man whose life has clearly not gone according to plan.

Even the fact that he became a father to Sophie at the young age of 20 implies that he may have missed out on some key moments in his development or his 20s.

We learn that he's not together with Sophie's mother and that he struggles financially, which is something that clearly brings him a lot of shame.

We see how he beats himself up over not being able to buy this rug.

Or when Sophie loses the expensive goggles, he seems to spiral a little bit mentally in these moments.

And when asked by Sophie, where did you think you would be when you were 11?

It's pretty painful for him to think about, and he doesn't seem to want to answer.

But think about the time that he, like Sophie at 11 years old, felt the entire world was in front of him.

And now at age 31, he is a financially struggling, separated parent of an 11-year-old.

After Sun is very insightful about how the characters' respective ages play into the different realities that they're navigating.

In the beginning of the movie, Sophie jokes that her dad is turning 130, but beneath this joke I think is the feeling that 31 just feels so far away to an 11-year-old.

Sophie is basically in the middle of like her own coming-of-age journey on this vacation.

But in contrast, Callum doesn't even know how he made it to age 30.

Sophie is almost at her beginning, and Callum feels like he is approaching a dead end in his life.

That's why birthdays are so exciting to Sophie, but so painful to Callum.

At the end of the movie, Sophie thinks that he would probably like it if she got everybody to sing happy birthday to him.

But when she does, Callum just seems like haunted by this moment.

When you're 11, every age feels like a new chapter in your life.

But at a certain point, age can become a scary thing.

Callum tells Sophie that she can be whatever she wants to be because she has time.

And I think he almost says this enviously, feeling like he no longer has time on his side.

And that's why it's also significant that Sophie in the present day, looking back on these memories, is now the same age as her father.

So perhaps from this perspective of her being older, she can understand more about him and empathize with his experience in a way that she just wasn't capable of doing when she was 11.

And I think it's implied by the dark lighting in Sophie's present day apartment that she has probably been to very dark places in her life.

No doubt her dad leaving was one of them.

And I think she now has a greater understanding of what he was going through.

Much of Aftersun details how Sophie and Callum are having opposite internal experiences at this resort, despite them, you know, spending most of their time together.

Sophie thinks it's nice that everybody shares the same sky.

And much of Aftersun involves the two staring at the sky or playing in the water.

The blue of the sky and the sea often bleed together visually.

And occasionally the film transitions seamlessly from shots of the sky to shots of the sea or the pool.

So maybe those things are kind of the same in terms of what they symbolize.

But for sure, the water, I think, is something that represents something different to each of these characters.

To Sophie, water is beautiful and bright, glistening, and it represents possibility and dreams.

From underwater, she gazes at the teens in the resort, imagining her future.

Sophie clearly admires the older kids and looks forward to being a teenager.

And lots of the older kids also have this all-inclusive band that lets them get things for free at the resort, which is something that her dad certainly can't afford for them.

And the fact that that's associated with the teenagers, I think, has to do with Sophie's vision of the future.

You know, the possibility that she could have, like, this all-access pass.

Like in that moment where Sophie is underwater, looking at all the teenagers, being romantic and everything, that yellow all-access band is clearly in view.

But to Callum, water is dark, menacing, and bottomless.

When Sophie loses her goggles in the ocean, which is a financial blow to Callum, he just kind of sadly watches the goggles, like, drift down into the dark sea.

And there's that moment towards the end where Callum wanders into the ocean at night when his mental health problems hit a peak, and the blackness of the sea fully engulfs him.

Like, the water is thrashing and aggressive, and the blackness of it almost implies, like, death.

So even the water in this film represents two different things to these different characters, which speaks to how our subjective experiences of the world can be so vastly different.

At 11, Sophie's at an age where she's starting to develop more emotional perceptiveness.

That's an age where you start to take a little bit of a deeper interest in relationships and people.

And Frankie Correo, to her credit, really brings that maturity, but also that silliness that an 11-year-old has.

It's just as much about her trying to understand her father at age 11 as it is about her later on in life trying to understand her father.

Some moments that I think are clear examples of Sophie taking an interest in her dad and knowing him on a deeper level, when she asks, Where did you think you'd be when you were 11?

Asking him questions that he doesn't always want to answer.

And in that brilliant shot where we see Sophie recording the moment with her mind camera, where the conversation between the two is being reflected off of a blank TV, I think that speaks to just Sophie trying to record her father.

And I think that she can tell that there's something, like, a little bit wrong.

When she loses her expensive goggles and her dad is quietly upset about it, she leans on him and she says, I know they were expensive.

And he almost seems, like, surprised that she noticed.

This gesture shows that she's, like, aware that he has these economic problems and she doesn't want to be kept away from knowing these things just because she's a kid.

There's also that moment where she gestures to him that, like, she knows that he smokes cigarettes, which is something that he doesn't want to tell her.

And she kind of gives him this look like, it's OK, like, I know.

And then there's the moment where she puts the sheets on Callum as he's passed out in his bed after his spiral of a night.

And the composition of the shot mirrors the shot in the beginning of the film where Callum tucks Sophie in and then goes out the back for a cigarette.

I think the shot shows that Sophie feels like she is capable of taking care of her dad in the way that he is capable of taking care of her.

And when her dad apologizes for that rough night, when they're at the clay pools, she doesn't really say anything, but she just, like, rubs the clay on him.

And I think that's a sign of her trying to forgive and comfort him.

She asks him where he got the mark on his shoulder and he doesn't tell her.

She's more than ready to listen, even if it cracks the portrait of the perfect happy dad that Callum wants to put on.

He tells Sophie that she can tell him anything about boys and drugs that she takes.

But what's tragic is that Callum won't reciprocate that same openness that he is asking of Sophie.

There's a great scene where they're in the hotel room and Callum is taking his cast off and he's, like, quietly in pain and he cuts himself and he's bleeding.

And Sophie is on the other side of the wall, just kind of picking his brain, trying to ask more about his relationship with her mom.

But while he's giving her some answers, he's hiding something more painful, like, literally going on with his arm, but also, you know, not literally, like, metaphorically hiding his pain.

And the cast in general, I think, is just symbolic of, like, him having an injury.

And the shot composition of this scene is really brilliant.

The contrast of warm and cold lighting and the wall as a barrier, this shot illustrates the rift between these two and Callum's failure to allow the two to fully connect, as well as their vastly different emotional states on this vacation.

There is one scene where Callum does reveal something sad about his life, where on his 11th birthday, his parents and everybody forgot.

Maybe this explains that he had a poor support system or an uncaring family.

Maybe that contributed to, like, his poor mental health.

Or maybe this piece of information is important because it shows how Callum is trying harder to be a good dad to Sophie like his parents weren't to him.

But in really each moment of the film, Callum is being a pretty awesome dad.

He and Sophie get to watch, like, other kids throwing tantrums and think, well, like, you know, that's not us.

And yet the devastating realization at the end of After Sun is that sometimes love isn't enough, especially in the face of severe mental illness and depression.

And I'm sure that looking back, Sophie is trying the best she can to be grateful for and hold on to the genuine love and guidance that her father gave her, despite that she may have trouble forgiving him for leaving.

A lot of the communication in After Sun is kind of indirect.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Why Aftersun is a Masterpiece | Spoilers

significant

mental

depression

present