Aftersun Trailer: One Of The Year's Best Films Is A Nostalgic Trip Down Memory Lane

At some point, every child has to grow up eventually and reconcile their memories of their parent with the reality of who they were as an actual person. This poignant, universal struggle is exactly what first-time feature filmmaker Charlotte Wells is attempting to dramatize in "Aftersun," the buzzy new film produced by director Barry Jenkins and picked up by indie studio extraordinaire A24. Impressively, it has already received overwhelming praise from making its rounds on the festival circuit, premiering during the 2022 Cannes Film Festival this past May (where it won the envied French Touch jury prize) and garnered even more glowing reactions at the Telluride Film Festival earlier this month. It also screened during the Toronto International Film Festival, where /Film's Sarah Milner reviewed the movie to extremely high praise and called it,

"...an incredibly nuanced film that layers meaning steadily through subtle cues and juxtaposition, drawing the viewer in deeper and deeper with each seemingly innocuous episode. There's a quiet intensity that is barely detectible initially but steadily grows, eventually becoming overwhelming by the film's end. It's a challenging watch."

Today, A24 has released a new trailer for the critical darling ahead of its theatrical release in October. Check it out below!

"Aftersun" stars Paul Mescal as Calum and Frankie Corio as Sophie, the father/daughter duo at the center of the film, along with Celia Rowlson-Hall as the adult Sophie looking back and remembering these events from twenty years in the future. The trailer footage, which mixes home-video footage into its picturesque cinematography, perfectly establishes the rose-tinted view that Sophie is recalling her childhood memories and her potentially unreliable perspective of her father, who may prove to be far more complicated than young Sophie ever could've imagined. In other words, prepare yourselves now for a tearjerker, folks.

From Scottish writer and director Charlotte Wells, "Aftersun" will be made available exclusively in theaters on October 21, 2022.

At a fading vacation resort, 11-year-old Sophie treasures rare time together with her loving and idealistic father, Calum (Paul 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, in Charlotte Wells' superb and searingly emotional debut film.