The distance of the last scene now closes in the most beautiful section of “Aftersun.” It begins with that scene teased in the opening, Sophie on her camera, the camera hooked up to the TV so they are both cast on screen in real time, and that personal question posed: what did you want to do when you were 11?

The question had a distancing effect when first shown and it does so again at first. Calum refuses to answer, then forcefully pulls out the cord connecting the camera to the TV. Sophie then reassures him that the camera is now off, it’s just the two of them and her recording it with her mind’s eye. She asks again: what did you do on your eleventh birthday.

Calum finally lets down the guard: he had to remind his parents that it even was his birthday, they didn’t remember. And when his mother heard this, she threw into a rage and demanded that Calum’s father take him to a toy store and buy him whatever he wanted. Calum’s timeline, by the way, aligns very well with my own — he would have been 11 years old in the late 1970s.

I can imagine my own parents also missing my birthday at that age, it was a very difficult point in my life when my parents were going through a divorce and I had been transplanted (for the first time) to Oklahoma. But I don’t believe they actually did miss my birthday and they certainly wouldn’t have taken me to a toy store at that point in my life.

Sophie asks what he got and Calum replies that he purchased a toy red phone, which Sophie says was a good choice. I got the sense that both Calum and Sophie found the forced toy purchase at that age to be ridiculous and perhaps indicative of just how little his parents understood him or his life’s path.

Before I cut away from this scene — which ends with Calum laying back down on the bed, seen only through the reflection on the television — I need to point out that four books have been visible, coming in and out of focus, throughout the scene. One is a book on meditation, the other about Tai Chi, a third that’s impossible to pick out the title on the spine. The fourth is a book of poems and prose by Scottish filmmaker Margaret Tait.

Tait made dozens of short films through a very long career, but only one feature film, the 1993 movie “Blue Black Permanent” which was released when she was 73 years old. It’s a remarkable, difficult to find film about intergenerational grief, where tragic events repeat in the history of a Scottish family and the narrative poetically bends across time in a way that you cannot quite tell whether feelings and events are happening in the current timeline or before. Charlotte Wells has called the film an inspiration for “Aftersun,” and I can definitely see the resemblance.

“Aftersun” gives us that “Blue Black Permanent” never quite delivers — an emotionally resonant relationship to ground the film. And Wells introduces a song to help deepen that emotional connection. “Tender” is a song by the British band Blur off their 1999 album 13. It’s a very long but lovely song that includes these lyrics that sound like they could be dripping out of Calum’s unconscious:

Tender is the night lying by your side

Tender is the touch of someone that you love too much

Tender is my heart, you know I'm screwing up my life

Oh Lord, I need to find someone who can heal my mind

They sit on the balcony together at night, talking, playing chess. He shares a sip of beer with her, which she doesn’t like at all. Sophie asks if he’ll ever live in Scotland again. Calum replies that sometimes when you leave a place you discover that you never were at home there. Sophie replies that she feels at home in Edinburgh. Calum, while expressing happiness that she feels that way, tells Sophie that life may take her many different places, she can’t know just where at her age. He tells her that she can be whoever she wants to be in life.

All of this is told in a series of very sweet shots — the two of them hugging, in almost a slow dance, Calum gently sitting over her on the bed, stroking her eyebrows. I should also note that Sophie mentioned earlier in the film how much she’d like to have a yellow room and throughout this scene, Calum is wearing a yellow shirt. He’s giving just the kind of comfort Sophie wants most.

The scene then abruptly jumps to another rave scene. Except this time we never see Sophie, just Calum. It’s always hard to tell exactly what’s happening in these rave scenes because there’s a strobe effect used in all of them, but it appears that Calum is dancing with a man in this scene.

The section closes with the Blur song still on … the camera slowly backing away from room, then cutting to a terrifying shot of Calum standing on the railing of the hotel balcony, balancing in a way that juxtaposes him against the falling parasailors above.

Calum is slowly, tragically, crashing out. The film is just being very discreet in the way it displays his spiral.