Paul Mescal plays a father in new A24 trailer ‘Aftersun’
After delivering an emotional and complex performance as Connell in Normal People in 2020, Irish actor Paul Mescal has become one of the most sought-after rising stars. A small role in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter alongside Olivia Coleman shortly followed, as well as appearances in music videos by The Rolling Stones and Phoebe Bridgers.
Mescal now has a string of upcoming film roles under his belt, and the trailer for his latest, Aftersun, has just dropped. Distributed by the revered A24, Aftersun joins the likes of Everything Everywhere All At Once, Bodies, Bodies, Bodies, and X as one of the company’s most anticipated films of 2022. The film even boasts a production credit from Barry Jenkins, who directed the stunning Oscar-winning Moonlight.
The emotional film, directed by newcomer Charlotte Wells, follows a father (Mescal) and his 11-year-old daughter Sophie (Francesca Corio) as they holiday together in Turkey during the late 1990s. However, the trailer suggests that these happy memories are slowly fading away. Instead, present-day Sophie (Celia Rowlson-Hall) must grapple with her pleasant memories as she comes to terms with the fact that her father has turned out to be a much different man than she remembers.
Aftersun has already premiered at International Critics Week during Cannes Film Festival, taking home the French Touch Jury Prize. Critics have praised the film with overwhelming positivity thus far, describing it as “sensuous [and] sharply moving” and “measured but relentless probing … mark [Wells] out as one of the most promising new voices in British cinema in recent years.”
Wells has described the film as “emotionally autobiographical”, explaining that “the original idea was a young father with his daughter on holiday. That was definitely always the core of it. I think it was inspired by just flipping through old family photographs, and it coincided with the point at which I was thinking about what my first feature might be.”
She continued: “In the early stages, it was a bit more of a conventionally structured piece about these two people who go on holiday in this very confined, bizarre area, and then find reason to leave it and kind of explore the place that they are in. Like, it began to be more informed by specific memories, not just from a holiday, but from throughout childhood. And I allowed that to form the outline of the very first draft of the script, even though I had been developing the idea, and building the world, for a while.”
The film, which promises a “superb and searingly emotional” experience, will be released in the UK on November 18th.
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