Aftersun’s repeated image of a strobe-lit dance scene is beautiful, dramatic and deeply ambiguous. Many viewers have offered their own interpretations of what Calum and Sophie’s slow-motion journey through this rave could mean. I’ve seen it described separately as “a sensory metaphor for Sophie coming to terms with her emotional baggage”, a representation of the “liminal space of love, anger and grief” as well as a symbol of Calum’s depression from which Sophie tries to break him free.
All these interpretations are valid, but each of them are limited in that they focus on one single theme from the film. I’d like to build upon these takes by offering my own interpretation, one that brings all the different themes of memory, grief and mental health together. Here’s what I think the rave really means.
Piecing Together the Fragments
As the opening credits roll, we hear the sound of a VHS tape being inserted into a VCR player. We don’t know it just yet, but this sound is actually adult-Sophie playing a tape from the holiday she spent with her father a couple of decades ago. We are then introduced to Calum from the perspective of the younger Sophie who holds the camcorder.
Through a glitchy segway where we catch our first glimpse of adult-Sophie in the TV screen’s reflection, we are plunged into the disorientating rave scene for the first time. Unlike later scenes from the dance floor, it doesn’t look like Calum is actually present here. Instead, the few flashes of light focus mainly on Sophie, who seems to be deep in thought. Her body is still and her eyes are closed whilst energetic revellers pirouette around her.
It is as if she is trying to conjure an image of her father, and is using the tape as a madeleine to transport her back to a time when they were together. Sure enough, after a montage of some more VHS footage as well as some strobe cuts to and from Sophie’s face, she opens her eyes and we end up in what feels like a new film. Far from the fuzzy, desaturated VHS footage and abstracted dance sequences, we now start to view a regular, linear story told in a familiar format.
In just over three minutes, the film has given us a major clue to what this mysterious rave scene means. The connection between the VHS tape and the strobe scenes suggests that Sophie’s memories are incomplete and unreliable. To fill in the gaps that are represented by the darkness that interperses the sporadic light, she must rely on other fragments to build a full picture of her late father. I would argue that there are three key fragments that serve this purpose.
The first fragment is Sophie’s own memory, or in her words, the “mind camera”. It captures the moments that Sophie spends with her father but are not recorded on any VHS tape. Memories are of course unreliable, which leads Sophie to lean on other sources of information to fill in the gaps.
The second fragment is the VHS tape that was originally recorded on Calum’s camera. These are objective recordings that capture subtle moments of subtext that may have been lost on young Sophie, but can now be fully understood using the benefit of hindsight and her adult sensibilities.
The final fragment is Sophie’s imagination. Using the clues from her memories as well as the VHS tape, Sophie is able to build a picture of what Calum might have been doing, thinking and feeling whilst she was elsewhere. For example, during the night they were separated, Sophie cannot possibly have known everything that Calum did before he passed out in her bed. She can, however, infer that he behaved irresponsibly based on his sincere apology the following day, despite Sophie originally thinking nothing of it. Therefore, we can think of the moments that Calum spends apart from Sophie as taking place in her imagination.
Together, Sophie’s memories, VHS footage and imagination complete a picture of a whimsical father-daughter holiday to Turkey, somewhere in the not-too-distant past.
Searching for Calum
At this point, you might ask a simple question. Why? Why is adult Sophie going to such lengths to piece together the fragments from her past? This is especially puzzling given that there are important things to attend to in the present, namely her baby, her partner, and her own birthday. Yet, it’s clear that this is not just any old Birthday. Although it’s not explicitly said, it seems likely, given adult Sophie’s circumstances, that she is turning the same age as her father did all those years ago. Her birthday therefore provides a direct connection to her memories of a significant holiday with her Father, and by extension her grief for his loss.
One of the key behaviours associated with grief is searching; the act of seeking out anything that might repair a physical attachment to a loved one. A person suffering from this form of intense grief will do everything they can to dig up sounds, sights, smells and people that reminds them, and brings them closer to who they lost. They might start to see apparitions in the spaces they used to inhabit, wearing the clothes and perfumes they used to wear. Sometimes the afflicted might even get so close that they feel as if they’ve crossed the void, that they have truly conjured their missing loved one into being. Sophie is spending her birthday doing just this. She is watching an old VHS tape of her cherished holiday to Turkey with her father whilst sitting next to the beloved carpet he bought there. Combined with her memories and imagination, these totems seem to resurrect a near-perfect image of her father.
However, rather than filling Sophie with happy memories of her late father, the picture that is presented to us is much more ambivalent. Sure, there are many moments of blissful happiness, but there are also are signs that Calum wasn’t as happy as Sophie once thought. The different fragments come together to illustrate this point.
When we first see the tape of Sophie recording her father, Calum is joyful. He dances and jokes with his daughter whilst performing for the camera. The tape cuts, and we think no more of it. Yet when the same clip resurfaces later in the film, we see that things weren’t quite as happy as they first seemed. Calum’s tone shifts as soon Sophie says she wants to do an interview. He insists, with an eerie heavy-handedness, that she stops recording.
This is the extent of Calum’s appearance on the VHS tape, and we are left with a number of questions. Why would a father be so defensive about their own daughter filming them? Does he have stage-fright? Is he insecure about his looks? or Is there something he’s trying to hide? To answer these questions, we are forced to move from the fragment of the VHS tape to the fragment of Sophie’s memory.
Here, Calum begins to open up a bit more. He answers Sophie’s questions, and explains that no-one remembered his eleventh birthday. From here, the conversation doesn’t really delve further into his problematic childhood, other than Sophie simply registering that it’s “a bit deep”. Of course, at the time, she likely had little understanding of this episode’s true implications. With adult sensibilities, however, we can infer much more from this short interaction. For example, we might link it to Calum’s feeling that he never really belonged in the city he grew up in, and start to build a picture of the neglectful, isolated childhood that he suffered. A childhood that may be the root cause of Calum’s depression.
So, why would Calum happily reveal this intimate detail to Sophie’s “mind camera”, if he was so defensive about revealing it to an actual camera? Well, as we’ve established, memory is unreliable. Calum may have hoped that a young Sophie might not remember this small detail about her father’s childhood. If it was caught on camera, however, this story would be there for posterity, where an older viewer would almost certainly understand the broader implications of his story.
Interpreting the Past
This brings me to the tragic conflict at the heart of Aftersun. The constant battle between Sophie’s desire to remember who her father really was, and her father’s attempt to curate her memories into a purely positive image of their time together. Calum is desperate for his daughter to not find out about his depression and goes to great lengths to obscure his suffering. Even when Sophie manages to relate to his feelings, Calum does his best to ignore her words, suck up his pain and carry on making happy memories.
SOPHIE (O.S.)
…Don’t you ever feel just, like, I don’t know. Like when you’ve been on a real high, like something’s been amazing, and then you kind of crash. And feel like you’re kind of…sinking or something like that. It’s weird. I don’t know.
CALUM
We’re here to have a good time.
At first, It seems as if Calum’s strategy works on Sophie. Whilst she does understand that there are certain problems in Calum’s life, like his uncaring parents, his dissociation from his home city and his financial difficulties, she doesn’t seem to join the dots and grasp the true gravity of Calum’s failing mental health. Instead, she believes that both her and her father are in the same blissful frame of mind, that they are under the same sky. Of course, this couldn’t be further from the truth, but it is exactly what Calum wants Sophie to remember. Nowhere is this deception more clear than in the scene where Callum is removing his cast while Sophie reads in the other room.
The warm, amber glow of the bedroom contrasts with the cold harshness of the bathroom, revealing the extent of Calum’s isolation and suffering. Here, Sophie’s memories are physically separated from what’s happening on the other side of the wall, suggesting that she’s using her imagination to fill in the gaps. Such glimpses into the dark show that Sophie is nearing a more complete understanding of her father, as well as the demons that plagued him.
Whilst Calum is clearly doing everything he can to mask his internal turmoil, there are times that he simply cannot hide his anguish any longer. Nowhere is this more clear than the karaoke scene.
TOUR REP
Calum and Sophie. Up you come please.
CALUM
You didn’t sign us up?
SOPHIE
Of course I did. We’ve done it every holiday since I was, like, five.
CALUM
Maybe you’re a little old for it now?
SOPHIE
What are you talking about? Those women were, like, 50 something. He shakes his head. 74. 75.
CALUM
Let it go. He’ll move on in a second. I’m not up for it tonight.
SOPHIE
Come on, it’s a laugh. And I chose one of your songs. We’re on holiday. Remember? We’re supposed to be having fun. Isn’t that what you said?
From this small interaction, we can see that this holiday is not like the others; that something has changed in Calum. He can no longer pretend to be the positive, fun-loving Dad that he so desperately wants to be. It is not that Sophie is too old or that Calum is embarrassed, but that he simply doesn’t have the energy to wear his mask in front of all those people. Wearing it in front of Sophie is tiring enough.
When he is finally alone, as imagined by adult Sophie, we can finally see Calum for who he really is, and understand how he truly feels. A man that is broken by depression.
The Last Dance
These competing interpretations of Calum come crashing together in the film’s final dance sequence. In Turkey, an ecstatic Calum rushes to the dance floor with his daughter. The two share a joyous dance whilst Sophie looks adoringly at her father. This is what Calum wants to be remembered for, and Sophie embraces him as tightly as she can, trying to savour the pure happiness of the moment. Meanwhile, as the symbolic rave mirrors this action, Adult Sophie juxtaposes her younger self with intense expressions of anger. She is coming to terms with how her father really felt and tries to grab hold of him just as she did all those years ago, only to be pushed away whilst Calum falls into the darkness. The words of Queen and David Bowie undercut the moment; “This is our last dance”.
At the end of the holiday, Sophie runs out of VHS tape and the manifestation of Calum that Sophie has created begins to fade away. He moves from the imaginary world she’s created back into the ambiguity of her memories. Sophie is forced to go through the feeling that she’s lost her father all over again, realising no sight, smell, sound, dream or VHS tape can ever truly bring him back.
Without doubt, the experience of reliving her past only to find that her father was in far more pain than she ever realised as a child, is incredibly difficult. Nonetheless, it is also an important moment of catharsis for Sophie. Now that she knows the full story, she can finally accept her loss.
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