Dan Conley’s Writing Projects

With Calum having an increasingly difficult time regulating himself around Sophie, this segment of the film features more space between them. There’s almost no interaction between the main characters in this stretch of the film. It begins with a shot of someone’s face underneath a wet wash cloth,

So much of “Aftersun” revolves around Calum pretending not to be in despair. There’s a fog around him that Paul Mescal evokes so beautifully that’s in the subtext of the dialogue, but rarely shows up in any direct manner. And this is perfect, considering the context of Calum

There’s no getting around the fact that Calum is a strange guy. We next see him and his daughter back at the hotel. First, she’s applying the same kind of lotion to his face that he used on hers earlier. Then we see him going through the completely

The details of “Aftersun” don’t all carry deep psychological meaning. Some of them are just easter eggs, little rewards to people who pay attention. Calum and Sophie did more than just make a phone call from that other hotel, Sophie started to play in the arcade … and then Calum

Film is rarely a subtle medium. Watching a movie is more an emotional experience than it is an intellectual one and because images and scenes go by so fast, filmmakers rarely put as much care into the finer points of story telling as compared to a poem or novel. This

I’m going to start my examination of “Aftersun” with a word from Orson Welles. When asked in a 1960 television interview what gave him the confidence to make a movie as bold and original as “Citizen Kane,” he responded “sheer ignorance.” Welles said that not coming up through the