SUMMARY:

The film opens on ADULT SOPHIE, aged 31, dancing solo in the middle of a crowded dance floor at a 90s rave. Under strobe lights, she sways to the music in her modern attire, her eyes shut to the scene around her. As the strobe lights change, time flits between the present and past, with an adult and 11-year-old CHILD SOPHIE each standing alone on the dance floor. The image establishes the dual timelines and the same woman’s shifting perspectives on one particular moment in her life.  

It cuts to black. The sound of a tape being loaded into a digital video camera cues the transition to Sophie’s active recollections of her childhood memories of her father in the late 1990s timeline. In the past, through video footage, we’re introduced to 11-year-old Sophie in context, seen with her father CALUM, 30, aboard a flight to Turkey. A young Sophie excitedly films her father and the clouds outside their window. Her excitement is not matched by Calum, who is more guarded and subdued with his smiles, as he looks over their travel guidebook. This opening sequence occurs all before the film’s main title, setting up the contemplative tone and visual and temporal deconstruction of their parent-child relationship.

Directly after the main title, the narrative continues in the 1990s timeline in mostly linear fashion. During the tour bus ride into the first leg of their trip, Calum retrieves a battery Sophie drops from a fellow passenger, revealing his full arm cast in the process. Calum and Sophie are the very last family to disembark from the tour bus. BELINDA, their tour guide, mistakes Sophie for Calum’s little sister, owing to his young age and youthful features. This mistake occurs frequently enough that Calum and Sophie have an in-joke about it. Compared to the other families aboard the bus, their hotel accommodations are “nice enough” but “modest,” suggesting their financial resources may be limited and a source of stress for Calum. Calum playfully mocks Belinda’s boisterous speech and energetic mannerisms for Sophie’s amusement while on board the tour bus. Later on their walk to the Turk Hotel, where they’re staying, Sophie eagerly copies Calum, mimicking Belinda’s voice for his approval.

Once inside, Calum and Sophie wait a considerable amount of time in the hotel lobby to be shown their room, only to then discover that the hotel accommodations Calum booked in advance–a double-bed room–have been mistakenly booked as a small one-bed unit. He lays a now exhausted Sophie down on the single bed to rest, removing her shoes and socks. As he gets Sophie settled, he tries to sort out the error over the phone with the front desk. Worn out himself, Calum takes his Walkman out to the hotel room’s balcony. He wishes he were elsewhere while he listens to music and struggles to light a cigarette with his injured arm. When he at last succeeds, he is relieved, but the sensation is fleeting. While Sophie lies sleeping behind the curtain that separates them inside their hotel room, he hoists himself onto the balcony and gazes down three stories. Wells emphasizes the three-story drop beneath the hotel balcony, as Calum seeks and finds momentary release from listening to music and feeling the air on his skin. He notices a hotel worker packing up sun chairs at ground level below him and observes him. Calum sits precariously positioned on the balcony all night, seemingly contemplating what would happen if he let go. He’s thought better of it by morning, however, just in time to return to his daughter’s side and close his eyes. Some feet away, the same hotel worker begins his morning ritual of setting out the sun chairs he stored away the night before.

As the day progresses, father and daughter relax poolside. Calum intermittently films Sophie’s dive attempts and they each observe an older couple with two daughters around Sophie’s age, ANDRÉA (10) and MARCIA (5), swimming nearby. Sophie is curious about the other children, but reluctant to socialize with “kids” and leave the safety and familiarity of her father’s side. When Calum suggests she say hello, Sophie turns the suggestion back on Calum, who teasingly objects to the parents being “so old.” 

Later, Calum looks into a business conference that he’d previously heard of taking place at a nearby hotel. After successfully persuading her dad to give her money for one game, Sophie takes off to go play video games in the hotel arcade. She observes OLLY, LAURA, TOBY, JANE, and SCOTT, a group of 15-year-old boys and girls joking around and playing pool nearby. Again, she seems slightly intrigued, but hesitant to make contact, instead focusing on playing her motorbike racing game. Meanwhile, Calum reports to the hall where the meeting is scheduled to take place, only to discover that he arrived too late, having forgotten to sync his watch to local time. He heads to the arcade to retrieve Sophie, interrupting Sophie’s play. She comments on how quickly he returned, to Calum’s begrudging amazement.          

Over dinner, Sophie asks about the meeting that didn’t happen and why Calum hasn’t mentioned Alice, one of his recent girlfriends. Calum reveals to Sophie that they’d broken up. Sophie regretfully processes this, gathering that the breakup means that the cafe Calum and his ex had been planning to open will no longer happen. Calum assures Sophie that he has other business plans with someone named Keith. The plans are vague and still in the early stages, but he and Keith are considering renting a house outside of London to set up their operation. He cautiously tells Sophie she would have her own room when she visited him. Sophie’s only concern is whether or not she can paint her new room yellow, a color her mom refuses to allow her to paint her current room at home. Although reluctant to run afoul of Sophie’s mom, Calum will likely indulge her because Sophie has a way of getting what she wants.

That evening in their hotel room, Sophie sleeps on the single bed as Calum sits on a fold-out bed and replays the video footage Sophie recorded from earlier that day. He watches Sophie call him her “marvelous” and “wondrous” father, rewinding the footage twice, as if to simultaneously admire his daughter’s work and lift his own spirits. He smiles to himself, shuts off the camera, but remains unable to sleep. His insomnia and the sound of two dogs fighting on the street outside their window keeps him awake until the early morning.

A dream sequence from the future timeline, in which adult Sophie dances at a rave, cuts into the action of the past 1990s narrative. Sophie spots her father on the dance floor, as he is in her memory at age 30. She struggles to keep him within her sight, losing him among the crowd.  

Back in the 90s timeline, Calum tries to enjoy a morning bath with a wet washcloth positioned over his face–his one private moment and form of meditation. His meditation is abruptly disturbed by an excited and determined Sophie, who knocks on the bathroom door to see why he’s been absent for so long and launches into running through their itinerary for the day. Calum is exhausted. His focus and moment of peace now broken, he gets out of the bath.

When Sophie calls her mom on a pay phone to inform her that they’d safely arrived at the hotel, she comments that her dad is okay but behaving weirdly, as he apparently does sometimes. She’s baffled by his Tai Chi poses before a nearby elevator, calling them a “slow motion ninja thing.” Her mother asks to speak to Calum. Sophie briefly steps away to play the motorbike racing game in the arcade. Finding both game consoles occupied, she walks back to Calum. Over the phone, Calum assures Sophie’s mother that they’re both okay. He congratulates her on something indistinguishable. He is vexed, but also appreciative that Sophie’s mother is checking up on him, as much as she is on Sophie. As Sophie approaches her father, she overhears him tell her mom that he loves her. Calum is visibly taken aback when he realizes Sophie heard him. 

Over the course of the next day and half, Calum plays pool with Sophie, teaches her self-defense, and takes her to a steam room, where the entrance of two older, leering men makes him so extremely uncomfortable that he quickly grabs Sophie and leaves. On one of her next trips to the arcade to play the motorbike game, she meets MICHAEL, another 11-year-old. They race each other in the game; Sophie wins, but fails to make the leaderboard. Just as Michael challenges Sophie to another match-up, Calum calls her to come along.

Speaking later in their hotel room, Sophie remarks on the fact that Calum and her mother never married. She’d thought when she was 7 that they were engaged, to each other or to different people, mistaking her mother’s comment that Calum’s phone line was busy on a call for confirmation that they were planning to get married. Calum is characteristically taciturn, taking in Sophie’s words, but refraining from providing any context for her. He instead sets about removing the cast from his injured arm, in preparation for their diving lesson. 

During their diving lesson aboard a boat, Calum strikes up a conversation with ONUR, a Turkish diving instructor his age. Onur teaches Calum a trick to get his wetsuit on and Calum asks about Onur’s life. Onur shares that he used to regularly travel around the world before eventually returning to Turkey to settle down with his partner, who is expecting their first child. Onur reflects that he’d imagined being 40 before he started having kids and thinking about marriage. Calum solemnly considers this and confides that he can’t envision himself reaching the age of 40; indeed, he is surprised to have made it to 30. Calum and Sophie return to their hotel at the end of the day feeling energized. Sophie excitedly recounts holding a seahorse in her hand and coming face-to-face with an octopus. It’s one of the best experiences she’s ever had. They make plans to travel again, perhaps to Hawaii. 

Sophie begins to branch out, socializing with the teens Olly, Laura, Toby, Jane, and Scott. After proving her prowess at pool while playing doubles with Calum, Olly, and Toby, Callum reservedly allows Sophie to join the whole group for a game of pool outside beside the neighboring hotel’s swimming pool. The theme of childhood brushing up against adulthood emerges once more in the sequence in which Sophie observes Laura order a lemon-flavored Fanta soda, copies her order, and joins in as the teens tease one another and dive into the pool. Though she quickly feels alienated when not only Jane and Scott, but Olly and Laura start to kiss in front of her. She leaves the swimming pool. 

Calum is fascinated by a textile he examines in a shop with Sophie. Hearing the shop owner detail the textile’s provenance and running his hands over it, Calum is overcome with emotion. While Sophie plays with the older kids, Calum returns to the carpet shop to purchase the textile. Later, Sophie examines her reflection in the mirror of their hotel room, adjusting her clothing to appear more mature, in mimicry of Laura and Jane. That evening, she films their hotel room, Calum, and herself. Setting the camera up on a table, she turns the camera on Calum and tells him she’d like to interview him, on the occasion of his upcoming birthday. She recently celebrated her 11th birthday and wants to know what his life was like when he was her age. Calum is visibly uneasy about appearing on camera for an extended period of time. He tells Sophie no, but she persists, asking him how he feels about turning 31 in a few days and what did he wish for his life to be like at 31 when he was 11? Did he imagine it would be anything like it currently is? What did he do for his 11th birthday? Sophie’s well-meaning questions are existentially triggering for Calum, though she has no way of comprehending that. Calum eventually relents and in an uncomfortably tight voice, divulges that no one remembered his 11th birthday; he had to remind his parents. His mother was furious, grabbed him by the ear and instructed him to make his father take him to the toy store to pick something out. He chose a red toy phone. 

While lounging poolside and walking outside around their hotel, Sophie asks Calum if he ever plans on returning to Scotland. He tells her that no, he wouldn’t return. Scotland was a part of his past; it no longer felt like home to him, and indeed it never truly felt like home because he never belonged. As he tucks Sophie in at night, she tells him that for her, Scotland does feel like home. Calum is pleased for her. He still encourages her to dream big. She may find as she grows that different places she hasn’t yet been to may also feel like home. He assures her that she can grow up to live wherever she likes and become whoever she wants to be; she has plenty of time. He gazes towards his own vacant bed, not seeming to think the same for himself. 

After dinner at the hotel amphitheater, the tour guides coordinate a karaoke show for guests to partake in.  Calum angrily responds to Sophie’s suggestion that they reprise their holiday custom of singing together at karaoke. Sophie urges Calum to join her onstage to sing R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion,” but to no avail. She falters through the entire song alone, feeling mortified and betrayed by Calum afterwards. This causes a rift between father and daughter. They separate; when Calum calls it an early night, Sophie defiantly stays behind.  

While wandering the hotel grounds, Sophie first runs into Olly, Laura, and their group engaged in a shot-taking competition at the bar. Laura gives Sophie her all-inclusive drinks wristband because she’ll soon be leaving the hotel and no longer has a need for it. Sophie eagerly accepts and tests out her newfound access by ordering a drink from the bartender. She leaves the bar to wander around some more, encountering Michael on her path. He tries to scare her by surprising her from behind, covering her mouth and grabbing her waist. Sophie reflexively puts the self-defense moves Calum taught her into practice, leveling Michael. After realizing it’s him, Sophie chides him for being foolish, but still accepts his invitation to hang out with him and his friends. He leads her to a covered indoor pool, where he tells her he likes her and asks if she fancies him too. Although Sophie’s positive response is noncommittal, she nonetheless has her first kiss with Michael. As this takes place, Calum ultimately decides to do his own wandering. He heads out to a public beach, where he disrobes to his underwear and plunges into the ocean for a late night swim. 

Sophie returns to their hotel room, only to find it empty and herself locked out. She goes downstairs to the reception desk, where she drifts off to sleep. A receptionist finds her and nudges her awake. With the receptionist’s help, Sophie manages to at last enter her hotel room. She walks in to find Calum asleep facedown in the nude on her bed. She’s startled at the sight and quickly covers him with the bedsheet. Weirded out, but resigned, Sophie reaches over Calum to grab her pajamas and go to sleep on the fold-out bed. 

The narrative cuts to adult Sophie in a New York apartment in the evening. Sophie has kept the Turkish carpet that Calum purchased; it now adorns her floor. She lives with a WOMAN, a friend or partner with a baby that may or may not also be Sophie’s. The woman checks on Sophie, asks if she’s okay. Sophie reassures her and the woman wishes Sophie a happy birthday. The sound of the baby crying punctuates the apartment. Sophie rises to tend to the baby. 

Adult Sophie searches for Calum in another interstitial sequence of the rave’s interior. She finds him dancing, drenched in sweat and looking like death. 

On the day of Calum’s birthday, they take the tour bus to visit cold springs and mud baths. Calum apologizes to Sophie for the previous day’s mishap. He’s rueful and inconsolable over abandoning Sophie onstage at karaoke, then for being the reason she couldn’t get into their hotel room. Sophie forgives him, but he remains distressed. After a beat or two, Calum asks Sophie if she had fun on her own after they parted. She reveals that she and Michael kissed. Calum is concerned that it may have been a much older boy, but Sophie assures him they’re the same age. Calum supposes that’s alright, as a quick peck on the cheek with a peer is innocuous. Sophie self-consciously clarifies that it was a bit more than a peck. Calum absorbs this and in turn, tells her that she can always tell him anything. As she grows older, starts going out more, meeting boys, and experimenting with drugs–if she chooses to—she can always tell him because he’s already been there himself. He doesn’t want any secrets between them. Sophie agrees, but is confused about why Calum is telling her all of this. Later, they dine at the hotel, Sophie gets the hotel staff to sing happy birthday to him. In public, Calum seems embarrassed, but pleased by the grand show of celebration. Privately, once he’s alone in their hotel room at night, Calum sits upon the bed naked and shielded from the outside by the thin, white curtain pulled across the balcony’s window. He recalls the singing from earlier in the day and sobs uncontrollably.

For the rest of their trip, he’s outwardly in high spirits. Sophie finally plays with Andrea and Marcia, the girls closer to her age. They gather together to pet and marvel at a kitten. During the finals of the table pool tournament, Sophie manages to beat a man in his 40s, winning a voucher for an upscale dinner. While splitting a sundae at dinner, Sophie declares their trip the best time she’s ever had. Calum is satisfied.

On the last night of their holiday, Sophie walks with her father back to the Turk Hotel. A makeshift dance floor is created in the outdoor space connecting the dining area and pool, attracting a dense crowd of people. The lights emanating from the impromptu dance party’s overhead disco ball overlap with the colors of the rave’s strobe lights. Calum dances animatedly and awkwardly, while Sophie resists joining in, arguing that she hates dancing. Calum, on the other hand, loves to dance. The camera follows him around for a bit, until he becomes lost in the crowd and separated from Sophie. Time is malleable, as the timelines once again blur and adult Sophie and child Sophie become interchangeable. At last managing to find Calum on the dance floor, adult Sophie reaches out for him. She tries to calm his increasingly erratic motions, while her younger self simultaneously shrugs him off outside the Turk Hotel. Adult Sophie accosts her dancing father. She pounds on his chest with clenched fists and grabs his shirt to ground him, overcome with rage and a mixture of other emotions. Her rage gradually fades into sadness; she hugs him close to her. In concurrent scenes, younger Sophie allows Calum to lift her up and spin her around as she presses her head against his chest. Calum places Sophie back down on her feet; they’re both elated and at peace. As young Sophie playfully pushes Calum away, he suddenly vanishes before adult Sophie, leaving her standing alone in the flickering strobe light.  

This is the last time Sophie is seen with her father. Sometime later, a video of Sophie walking through an airport holding the hand of an airline employee plays from inside the New York apartment. She cheerfully reiterates that their holiday is “the best ever” and protests that she doesn’t require babysitting. She grins, sticks her tongue out, waves, and blows a kiss for the camera. Calum’s voice is heard offscreen, telling Sophie to give his love to her mom. Young Sophie is as playful and mischievous as ever as she holds the camera and Calum’s gaze for the last time on film. What exactly happens to Calum–abandonment or death–is never made clear. Adult Sophie films the video footage playing on her television, capturing her younger self’s gaze and filming her apartment and current expression in turn. She scans her apartment and returns the camera’s focus to the video recording, in which her father now appears onscreen, smiling and waving goodbye. He walks away, enters the dark, crowded rave through a set of double doors at the end of a long corridor. The camera pans back to Sophie, sitting on her couch. She gets up to respond to the sound of a crying baby out of frame. 

In the final shot, Sophie and Calum sit on the public beach in Turkey. They each gaze at the ocean and simultaneously jump up and run towards it.  

COMMENTS:

CONCEPT/ ORIGINALITY:

AFTERSUN is an intimate family drama and coming-of-age tale that thoughtfully renders a father-daughter relationship, as filtered through recorded video footage, shifting time, and gaps in memory. In a similar vein to other retrospective and multi-timeline parent-child coming-of-age stories such as The Roads Not Taken, My Name Is Emily, and the latter part of Russian Doll’s second season, Aftersun is a visually expressionistic, and sometimes surreal, focused study of a close but conflicted father-daughter bond. In her early thirties, Sophie revisits her memories of her early relationship with her father Calum through meticulously rewatching home videos the two recorded of their trip to Turkey when she was 11 years old. The concepts of memory, growing up, parenthood, and subjective truth are artistically explored through grounded, realistic relationships and alternate uses of experimental (e.g. incorporating interstitial sequences that play with lighting and merge past and present timelines within a single scene, digital video camera footage as a narrative framing device, and a continuous music sequence played during the story’s climax) and verisimilar elements (e.g. succinct, believable dialogue and attention to place and time period details). Through two timelines, the late 1990s of Sophie’s childhood and the late 2010s of her adult life, Wells questions Sophie’s limited perspective on her father. This interrogation reveals the friction between a parent’s weathered adulthood and a child’s juvenile innocence; the two states are oftentimes in direct opposition to one another, yet the actors, parent and child, need to find enough moments of alignment in order to succeed for the child’s sake. The film posits that In every childhood memory, there are two realities running parallel to one another: the parent’s subjective experience and the child’s subjective experience. 

STORY/ STRUCTURE/ PACING:

The story is strong, mostly rooted in realism, funny even in its moments of darkness, and very touching. Structured in dual, alternating late 1990s and late 2010s timelines, the story is mostly linear, occurring in the past timeline. Cuts to Sophie’s imagined interstitial moments and home video footage are also weaved throughout. Wells does a fine job of drawing a convincing and detailed picture of the core father-daughter relationship, keenly painting the late 1990s setting of their Turkish holiday, reproducing the natural rhythms of everyday speech across the variously aged children and adults, and rounding out the secondary characters in recognizable and humorous ways. The narrative’s pacing is slowly and carefully built, layering images, moments, and dialogue. More character-driven than plot-driven, the meditative pace focuses on silences and nonverbal cues just as much as the actual words the characters speak. While the slow pacing aligns with the arthouse style and overarching themes of the story, at times, it hinders its momentum. Namely, the abstract interstitial scenes featuring adult Sophie searching for and observing her father in the nightclub detract from the narrative momentum of the main linear 1990s timeline. The shorter, Turkish scenery interstitials are more effective in adding to the narrative’s cohesion.

DIALOGUE: 

The dialogue utilizes short and quickly delivered sentences, interruptions, cross-talking, pauses, and beats that mirror the flow of natural speech. Each character’s dialogue generally suits their characterization. Children are allowed to sound like children, stumbling upon words’ pronunciations and learning in real time. Wells is attentive to the balancing act of age-appropriate code-switching, or the ways in which adults modulate their speech in front of children and around each other. Frequently, a lot seems to be packed into what isn’t said, as Calum assesses how to deliver certain details about his life to Sophie. Although genuinely caring, he holds back and performs being okay out of necessity, trying to ensure that Sophie enjoys herself on their trip. Occasionally, Sophie filters her own speech, particularly when Calum inquiries after her mom. She hesitates to tell him whether things at her mother’s house are tense or not. Subtext bears considerable weight. Running through the very concise, naturalistic dialogue is a heaviness. Calum’s underlying existential dread–his anxieties over raising Sophie well, making certain she’s happy, well-rounded, and capable of defending herself–and his disillusionment with his own circumstances in his separate life, are perpetually present. He struggles to balance optimism for his daughter’s future with a world-weary despair brought on by his own experiences.  

CHARACTERS: 

Characters are mostly memorable and realistically rendered. The central father-daughter relationship is complex, the respective key players are fully formed, and we’re given glimpses into their interiority. The only sense of disconnect arises from the portrayal of adult Sophie. Unlike her 11-year-old self, 31-year-old Sophie isn’t given much of an interior world. Her interests and quirks are hinted at through the belongings and decor in her apartment. Of the three principal characters, adult Sophie says the least and is allowed minimal interaction with the people and circumstances in her present-day life. As it stands, she is broadly sketched; she’s shown reflecting on the past in dream sequences, but inactive in the present, except to get up occasionally to check on a crying infant. It would be great if Wells delved into Sophie’s views about parenthood, the trajectory her adult life has taken, the specifics of Calum’s mental state, and how she lost him. Examples of questions the writer might consider answering for herself: Is Sophie content or discontent with her adult life? Is she overjoyed or petrified about parenthood, or a combination of the two? Why? Does she suspect any of her current feelings were shared by Calum at the same age? How exactly did Sophie lose Calum (abandonment, estrangement, death by accident, or death by suicide)? What do the specific circumstances of his absence mean for her? What has Sophie since learned about her father’s mental health and how it connects to her own mental health as an adult?

CATHARSIS:

In the closing shot, the touching image of father and daughter together on the beach restates the tight-knit and playful dynamic of their relationship, seen anew in context with everything that precedes it. That being said, the overall ending is a bit ambiguous. The final shift from the linear narrative in the 1990s timeline back to the present timeline occurs abruptly, suddenly revealing Sophie watching the DV footage on her television screen in her New York apartment. One moment, the 11-year-old Sophie and Calum are on the dance floor on the last day of their trip, with Calum awkwardly flailing about and Sophie insisting she hates dancing; then without warning, that narrative dissolves into another interior rave sequence. Sophie inexplicably loses Calum in the crowd all over again. She engages in a physical struggle with him, trying to calm his frenzied movements by pounding on his chest, then hugging him. At the same time, her younger self catches up to Calum and they share an exhilarating twirl about the dance floor. The perspective shifts again to a young Sophie walking in an airport accompanied not by Calum, but an airline representative. Even as Calum is heard offscreen saying goodbye to Sophie, the scene suggests that Calum abandons Sophie or dies shortly after the dance club turned rave scene.

The ending could benefit from committing to a more literal and unequivocal representation of Sophie’s loss of her father. The use of interstitial rave sequences and frequent refocusing of the camera’s lens on Calum, Sophie, and their hotel room adds a visually interesting atmosphere to the first half of the story, but starts to lose its effectiveness somewhere after the music sequence. In the latter half of the film, particularly after the tense karaoke scene, this reliance on visual abstraction undercuts the emotional impact of the poignant, carefully constructed father-daughter portrait Wells builds until this point. The figurative search for, reunion with, and ultimate separation from her father at the rave is certainly bittersweet when juxtaposed with scenes of the younger Sophie dancing with him. However, if instead of cutting away from Sophie’s final moments with her father in Turkey and dropping the audience back into the present New York timeline quite so suddenly, Wells leaned into and lingered on the immediate aftermath of Calum’s actions, then the magnitude of his absence upon Sophie would strike a heavier blow to viewers. Sophie’s need to tell this story now, to urgently revisit and process these specific childhood memories, would also become clearer. It’s hinted, but not explicitly stated, that the crying baby in the New York apartment is Sophie’s child, thus her experience of recently becoming a mother would be a catalyst that brings up unprocessed emotions about her dad. Her 32nd birthday also coincides with her possibly newfound parenthood. If Calum did indeed die at 31, it would mark the first birthday that she outlives her father.      

Perhaps including fewer interstitial scenes of the rave, introducing elements of Sophie’s New York life earlier on in the narrative, and allowing adult Sophie to definitively state and come to terms with the nature of Calum’s death would help here. One of the interstitial scenes implies that Calum overdosed on some unidentified pill he took at the rave, but much is left to speculation. In that particular moment, Sophie may have also turned her head because the idea of imagining Calum take drugs and kiss women who aren’t her mother is naturally disturbing as his daughter. Lifting the veil between her idealized image of him and the reality of his separate adult life, and human fallibility, is a disorienting exercise. Where appropriate, substituting some of the brief additional interstitial scenes listed at the end of script for the rave scenes may be another subtle way of integrating visual transitions that vary the pace without losing ground in the narrative.     

Conclusion:

The story and cast of characters are well conceived, however the execution, namely some of the more surreal stylistic choices in the interstitial moments, doesn’t always land. I highly recommend the script. There’s a solid foundation, strong core relationship between the 11-year-old Sophie and her father Calum, relatable circumstances, and a carefully constructed body that is nearly there. With a few tweaks to adult Sophie’s characterization–more concrete details about her adult life in New York, what she thinks and feels about parenthood, and a clearer picture of what’s at stake for her in revisiting her childhood memories and confronting her range of feelings about her father–the writer could really land the emotional resonance. I would strongly consider the writer, after taking a second look at adult Sophie and the story’s stakes.