Unraveling, understanding and ultimately making peace with your memories is one of the hardest things a human mind has to learn how to do. It also feels kind of impossible to talk about. How do you put into words the feelings of warmth, of love, of grief, of shattering silence? Grief, which is love after all, is something that washes over you, with random flashes of life resurrecting what you once lost. Some blurry holiday footage; echoes of a phone call where you hung up too soon.

It is, really, what most good filmmaking tries to do—animating something that didn’t quite make sense when it actually happened. It’s what Aftersun, the subtly spellbinding debut feature from Scottish filmmaker Charlotte Wells, succeeds at with such clarity and delicate empathy that it’s a bit breathtaking. A piece of fiction, it’s drawn from her family story, and it becomes ours, too.

Wells was a little wary about mishandling her memories. Framing a low-key holiday at an all-inclusive resort in Turkey (a staple for ’90s British kids) between a ten-year-old girl, Sophie (Francesca “Frankie” Corio), and her father Calum (Paul Mescal), Aftersun captures the formative moments where love—and a cheap, sunny two-week getaway—tries to plaster over wounds that have been deepening for more than a decade. It’s in the moments where you look at one another through sleepy eyes, your sun loungers maybe 30 centimeters apart, as much as those where you’re trying to make sense of shaky video footage you took, zooming all the way in on your dad’s nearby dive into the most shallow swimming pool you’ve ever seen.

“I was very aware of accidentally overwriting memories, or, in making this film, that I’d be creating an alternate version that would somehow supersede the reality of what happened,” Wells tells me over Zoom from New York, in the thick of a busier press season than she ever expected for a film she had no idea would touch so many people. “The experience I had with my short films was that they tended to be understood and appreciated in their emotional intent by a few people,” she says. “And that was always good enough for me. I was never looking to catch the majority of an audience, and that was my expectation of making this film too. But somehow, we turned that ratio a little bit.”

Try a lot: the film has only just received its official US release, with more territories to come, but Aftersun already ranks at number twenty on the official Letterboxd list of the top 250 feature films directed by women. David Ehrlich has watched the film six times at the time of writing, and his feeling that it “hurts so good” is one many Letterboxd members have agreed with since the film opened in the Critics Week sidebar at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Katie Walsh writes that it “slices with such a sharp, gentle blade you don’t even realize you’ve been cracked open until it’s already happened,” and for Ariel Lebeau, Aftersun “washed me out to sea all over again.” What Aftersun does is the cinematic embodiment of the alchemic reaction that makes goosebumps exist.

That was a line somewhat improvised by Corio, the incandescent eleven-year-old making her acting debut here after her mum responded to a casting call posted on a Facebook group. Wells is supremely careful about speaking on behalf of her young star, but admits these moments of sadness perhaps come less easily to Corio than the film’s more joyful moments do. “She found the sadder parts of the script confusing I think, but that’s because she’s just turned eleven and I think she’s living in a pretty happy home, so those feelings wouldn’t come naturally,” Wells says. “But I gave her some key lines, including ‘it feels like I’m sinking’ and then let her find her own way there. It was a beautiful moment where the script’s intentions meet the actors, who find their own way.”

The moment, after Sophie and Calum have spent the day swimming in turquoise waters and chatting about her school teachers—even the pretty one—isn’t anything to worry about, really, when you think about all the times after a beautiful birthday party or family celebration that it can just feel like the air has run out. But two things are happening at once in Aftersun, as ever. Sophie is in the moment, transparent and vulnerable but ultimately unbothered, while Calum is holding on for dear life, as he sees the warning signs.

“It was a way to connect them in that moment, where Calum’s experience of that feeling is much more intense than hers, and hers is written to be somewhat momentary,” Wells explains. “We all have these highest of highs that somehow are brought down at the end of the day. That was how Sophie was feeling in that moment, and Calum can’t quite interpret it in the confined way that maybe it’s intended at that point in time, and reads so much more into it and can’t really confront that.”

Meeting Corio and Mescal in person for a brief but beautiful photoshoot and conversation throws up a lot of the same push and pull Wells describes and the film spotlights. Corio is overflowing with energy, giddy a few hours before the London premiere of her first ever film, while Mescal is thoughtful, focused, careful about what he shares and just grateful to be here. Corio says her favorite moment of the shoot, which included two weeks before filming began where she and Mescal could get to know one another and just enjoy their own holiday, was her birthday because she got a “massive cake”, before then joking that, of course, what she enjoyed most was the friendships.

Mescal loved the day on set that Sophie and Calum took a trip to a Colosseum-type structure further up in the hills, where the pair also experienced a traditional mud bath and Calum opened up to his daughter about being truthful, and always staying close, after a fraught evening of karaoke together. The actor, who got his big break in the similarly raw and personal emotional drama Normal People, looks back fondly on the handshakes he and his young scene partner made up to intensify their father-daughter bond. He also enjoyed the minute of silence that Wells asked for each day, which he found “useful”. Corio hated it.

That perfectly epitomizes the attracting magnets that are this pair, so different in countless ways yet drawn together over time and space to hold onto those moments they cherished, however fleeting. Despite Corio’s reservations, silence really is major in Aftersun—in the moments where Sophie as an adult quietly rewinds footage, or sits with her own thoughts to piece together the missing parts of what happened, or as Calum tries as hard as he can to find peace in his own head, long after younger Sophie has fallen asleep.

“There’s also this bizarre tradition among the men in my family, where they all practice tai chi, without really much formal instruction.” So Mescal had to teach himself, from one of those For Dummies books you’d usually brush past at the airport. “I find it quietly tragic—somebody trying to teach themselves inner peace from a self-help book,” the actor laughs, while admitting that, of course, he fully committed to it.

“Part of what was really hard about writing Calum,” Wells says, “is how you dramatize so much that is internal. How do you dramatize depression, how do you dramatize a search for peace? “Tai chi offered a really beautiful way of showing an action and a movement. It’s so connected to breathing, which was always a huge part of the script and is in all my films. I’m so interested in the body and in physical movement.” And so Mescal learned from scratch, and found movements he was drawn to, and in turn shared those with Corio. Getting to know the practice, getting to know this man.

The bond between Mescal and Corio, and how they hold Wells’ vulnerability so close to their hearts, is palpable. Wells speaks of the way Mescal became an “extended part” of Corio’s family, going above and beyond any actor’s mandated two hours per day of bonding time while just enjoying a free holiday before the cameras started rolling.

In our London meeting, Mescal and Corio raise their hands and proudly declare themselves part of “team Charlie”. On stage after the film’s premiere, Mescal is protective of Corio, without losing sight of just how much she wants to have a laugh. “Frankie’s parents let me have a degree of responsibility, which was new to me,” Mescal tells the audience, before admitting he, born and bred in County Kildare, Ireland, stayed in his Scottish accent, which he had modeled off Corio’s dad, in order to nail it for the entire shoot.

When the actors and I reflect on what Wells’ story makes them feel about their own families, Corio immediately shares her theory: “I think it makes Paul want a kid because he loves me so much.” Mescal doesn’t disagree, though he makes sure to poke fun at Corio who called him her “best friend” on stage in London, for him to jokingly clarify: “friends”. But he also wrestles with the tough situation you find yourself in when a film like Aftersun opens these wounds but doesn’t necessarily hand you a prescription to nurse them back to health.

“It probably starts a conversation, but it doesn’t make those conversations any easier to have,” he says of what might happen when his parents see the film. “I’m like, ‘What do you think, dad?’ and he just goes ‘Yep, very good…’. Those conversations with the people you know best are far harder than conversations with your friends.” So what do you do with those conversations, and what does this film, really, leave you with? Mescal thinks it’ll be a complex thing, if Aftersun reaches people in the way he believes it should be felt. “They’ll probably feel a great sadness. But I’d also like them to come away knowing that memory is a very powerful thing, and it’s warm.”

A lot of Aftersun deals with the unknown, and taking a leap of faith that what’s worth remembering will survive. For Wells, it’s epitomized in one simple but crucial moment between Sophie and Calum, just as their holiday is beginning.

“There’s a scene where they’re arriving from the airport to the hotel, and she’s asleep on his lap on the bus and his broken arm is resting on top of her,” Wells says. “I remember the line in the script described ‘his hand resting on her with effortless intimacy.’ It’s really easy to write, but actually conveying that on screen…” She can’t find the words, but that is where her actors come in and do their best work.

It ended up being the final thing Mescal and Corio shot together. Like the way we all have a tendency to pull each other apart and spend a lifetime trying to hold onto all the broken pieces, there was no order. Time doesn’t matter when love is the only compass left. “I remember Paul turning to me and saying, ‘We couldn’t have done this in the first week.’ They had had time to build that.”