A24 shares the heart-wrenching trailer for Paul Mescal's father-daughter portrait Aftersun
Charlotte Wells' feature film debut Aftersun arrives in theaters on October 21
In the second of his A24-attached films of the fall, Normal People’s Paul Mescal plays a Scottish father on vacation with his young daughter (Frankie Corio). The Charlotte Wells debut has received rave reviews ahead of its theatrical premiere on October 21.
The official description for Aftersun reads:
At a fading vacation resort, 11-year-old Sophie (Corio) treasures rare time together with her loving and idealistic father, Calum (Mescal). As a world of adolescence creeps into view, beyond her eye Calum struggles under the weight of life outside of fatherhood. Twenty years later, Sophie’s tender recollections of their last holiday become a powerful and heartrending portrait of their relationship, as she tries to reconcile the father she knew with the man she didn’t.
Though Mescal made his name by playing a secondary school student in the adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Normal People, he did not shy away from taking on the very different role of a single, young father.
“There was just something about the way that Charlie wrote this because it felt to me like I wasn’t really aware of the politics of ‘you shouldn’t really be playing dads, you’re 26,’” Mescal previously said at the 2022 Telluride Film Festival, per IndieWire. “I was like, ‘This is a fantastic character. I’m gonna get to go into the weeds with it.’”
Wells serves as the director as well as the writer for the film, channeling her own relationship with her father when penning the script.
“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,” she told Deadline earlier this month. “But over the course of writing it, it just became a bit more personal. 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.”
Following its world debut at Cannes, Aftersun earned the French Touch Prize of the Jury at Cannes’ Critics’ Week. After premiering at the New York Film Festival next week, the film will arrive in theaters on October 14. A24's God’s Creatures, also starring Mescal, is currently showing in theaters.