Calum’s crying scene that closed the last section ends with the camera trained on a postcard that reads: Sophie, I love you very much. Never forget that. Dad.

When I was a teenager probably around 15 or so, I remember getting a call from my dad, who lived in Colorado at the time. He sounded drunk, and the gist of the call was him declaring that he would love me no matter what I did in life. It seemed like such a strange thing to hear from your own father. It’s something I tried to unpack for years, especially after he passed away. Was he really fishing for that same pledge of unconditional love from me?

The power of “Aftersun” is that it makes us consider and confront the fragments of memory from our childhoods and try to piece together what our parents may have been going through at the time. The movie is an exercise in Charlotte Wells trying to come to terms with a father who died when she was a teenager. The main narrative of the vacation plays a central role in those memories, but there are others that seep in.

Because the film is from her point of view, via Sophie, we have to contextualize that crying scene as something imagined by Wells in reaction to that postcard. What might have her dad been experiencing that led him to send that card? She dramatizes it this way, juxtaposed against his daughter gathering a bunch of strangers to sing “For he’s a jolly good fellow.”

Some lovely shots follow — an empty pool with floating rafts, a waterpark in early morning before customers arrive, the amphitheater empty amid its beautiful, scenic backdrop, Paul and Sophie getting off that raft, then the two of them setting with their back to us on a beach. The movie spends a surprising amount of time with characters face away from us.

Then after a lovely sunset, Calum and Sophie are having one last meal — Calum stealing his daughter’s dessert, Callum giving a photographer 50,000 lira for a polaroid of the two, then putting rabbit ears over her head, Calum asking if she had a good holiday and Sophie replying “the best.” They joke about spending the rest of their lives in hotel rooms.

And then there’s a scene that slays me every time and I don’t really know why. They come upon an area at the hotel where people are dancing and the Queen/David Bowie song “Under Pressure” is playing. It’s not the world’s most danceable song, and Calum immediately gets up and starts moving in a way most likely to make Sophie cringe. On the director’s commentary, Charlotte Wells said Paul Mescal would get up and dance like this throughout the shoot to make Frankie Curio laugh. And they resume their multi-part argument over things one wants to do, but not the other: in this case, Sophie says she doesn’t dance.

But then the movie does something magical that Charlotte Wells evaded explaining. The rave scene returns and intercuts the dance scene … so now we get Calum and Sophie dancing joyfully on their last night of vacation along with them both dancing in confusion and disappointment within Sophie’s grown up unconscious and the brilliant lyrics of the song adding inexplicable depth to it all. And to make this scene that no words could ever do just to that extra bit better, the editing is otherworldly. Blair McClendon’s editing of this film is incredible — and I believe his friend (and the film’s producer) Barry Jenkins provided some uncredited editing assistance on this scene as well.

Here’s a link to the scene on YouTube. Along with the magical dinner scene in “Drive My Car,” it’s my favorite scene of the decade so far.

Wells had originally intended to end the film right there, but I think she made a wise choice giving a less intense end for Calum and Sophie, an opportunity for Sophie to be a little goofy at the airport as they say goodbye. The movie then pans into grown up Sophie’s New York City apartment as she watched the miniDV video of the vacation we’ve been watching throughout, trying to put the pieces of these memories together.

The ends with Calum recording Sophie as she gets on her plane, then walking alone out a door at the airport into a room with strobe lighting, evoking the rave scene once more.

It’s tempting to reach the end of “Aftersun” and ask “what does everything mean?” as if the film is an elaborate knot to be unraveled. And there are dozens of essays and YouTube videos on the internet attempting to do just that. But as I reach the end of the film, I’m reminded what the great Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky once said about the many attempts to explain his masterpiece “Mirror” — it’s not meant to be solved like a puzzle, it’s meant to be felt.

I believe we are living in deeply disjointed times. I have remarked that, for me, everything that has happened since 1995 feels like it’s happened at once. The moral imperative of our times is for people in leadership positions to embrace not-knowing, not pretending to have all the answers or to understand a world that is clearly beyond all explanation. The mark of leadership in the world is the humility to express your own confusion and limitations, while empowering others to take action on the parts of life closest to them.

I am not an optimistic person, but my one shred of optimism for the world is that young people can embrace a movie like “Aftersun” that is felt, not understood, and this movie may lead them to Bergman’s “Persona” and to “Mirror” ... and perhaps from there onto Strindberg and Chekhov … and finally onto what John Keats described as “negative capability” in Shakespeare: the ability to exist in uncertainty, mystery and doubt.

It’s there, in the un-knowing, that we finally see humanity in its humble failure, and maybe recapture that desire to keep going in the face of our overconfident marches into the abyss.

And so, I’ll close my look at “Aftersun” with the lines that moved me the most. From the song “Under Pressure” by David Bowie and Queen:

'Cause love's such an old-fashioned word
And love dares you to care for the people on the edge of the night
And love dares you to change our way of caring about ourselves
This is our last dance
This is our last dance
This is ourselves
Under pressure