While Paul Mescal’s Oscar nomination has brought this film to global attention, it was already building the kind of word-of-mouth and critical attention that creates a classic. Made by first-time director Charlotte Wells, it’s a deeply moving slice-of-life that builds from the ordinary to the truly extraordinary, carried almost entirely by outstanding performances from Mescal, best known for his role in Normal People as young father Calum, and newcomer Frankie Corio as his pre-teenage daughter Sophie.
Wells, who wrote the script from the basis of her own childhood memories, set the film in the 1990s, sending her two lead actors on a package holiday to Turkey as she herself had done around Sophie’s age. Period details are inserted unobtrusively, aided by a soundtrack that carefully mixes the well-remembered with the almost-forgotten, helping to build a convincing picture of the era while telling a timeless story. Her aim, she explained at the film’s launch, was to summon up the unique atmosphere of the experience of a first trip abroad: “I never forgot the feeling of heat as soon as I got off the plane, it was the beginning of the adventure, but the clock already marked the hours. On the bus on the way to the hotel I thought that in a few days I would do the reverse route.”
At the heart of the film is the relationship between the troubled but devoted Calum, separated from Sophie’s mother, and his daughter. To build this, the two spent a fortnight of preparation time in Turkey, staying in the same kind of hotel in the resort town of Oludeniz where they would film. As Corio told the BBC, this was just like a holiday: “We went swimming in the sea, played pool and ate ice-cream. I had no training apart from learning to play pool for some scenes – Paul taught me to play pool.” Fortunately for Mescal, it seemed no one recognised him from his famous role, even when he and Corio went on a trip to Istanbul: “I don’t know, maybe there weren’t any Normal People fans out there. We stayed only two days in Istanbul, it was very calm. Nobody came to us.”
Adding to this freedom was the timing of the production, which kicked off at the end of the pandemic, in May 2021. “They opened for us on the day we arrived,” producer Adele Romanski told Screen Daily, “one hotel, so that we could sleep that night. They were still filling the pool with water. The first few days, the beach was empty. By the time we’re wrapping the movie at the end of summer, it’s full of people.”
Filmed entirely on location, using both conventional cameras and digital footage supposedly shot by Calum and Sophie on a video, the film immerses us in the package-holiday experience, from poolside entertainment and binge-drinking teenagers to the joys of warm seas and first sights of places outside the familiar. Here’s our guide to the world of Aftersun.
Ölüdeniz
The chief location for the film is Oludeniz, a resort town in Fethiye, on Turkey’s south-west coast. In the 1990s, as now, this was a popular destination for British holidaymakers, hence the wall-to-wall English language and even occasional Union Jack. It’s a classic fishing village that has sprawled along the coast with the growth of tourism, well-known for the paragliders that take off from the Babadag mountain above the town, and which form a backdrop to the film.
For Calum and Sophie’s hotel, the production used two different buildings. Most of the filming took place in the Telmessos Neva Hotel in the Hisaronu region, inland to the north of Oludeniz. This 237-room complex is where we see the waterslides and the giant sunbeds, as well as the pool table where Sophie makes friends with some of the older British holidaymakers. It’s also the venue for the evening entertainment, including a performance by the holiday reps early in the film and the karaoke night on the last night of the stay.
Other scenes were filmed at the Turk Hotel, a smaller 50-room establishment close to the sea. Here we see Calum and Sophie poolside applying suncream, and it’s also the venue for the extraordinary closing scene where father and daughter dance to Under Pressure on their last night in the hotel.
In both hotels, period details were added by production designer Billur Turan, who was in residence with the cast and crew for the filming time. “Our art warehouse was next to the pool, and we set up our carpenter’s workshop in the side garden,” she explained to a Turkish journalist. “We tracked down 90s Fethiye in Flickr albums: umbrellas, towel patterns, poolside shows, open buffets, vehicles on the streets, collecting period items from antique dealers.”
Outside the hotels, Wells took Mescal and Corio around the town, filming with a video camera for improvised scenes. “There was a lot of fun and freedom in those sequences,” she told Indiewire. “And there are some in the film that were instances of Paul, Frankie and I just roaming the streets. ‘Big Head’ is the one that ended up in the film, where [Calum’s] saying that she has a big head and she says that’s a bit rude.”
Wells also made use of Belcekiz Beach, which runs along the front of the town. This is where we see Calum and Sophie swimming together on their first day, and also see Calum at night on his own during the last night.
Sultaniye
On their way home to the airport, the two take a coach trip to a mud bath, where they discuss Cleopatra. This is filmed in Sultaniye, on Lake Koycegiz, about two hours’ drive north-west of Oludeniz. It’s Turkey’s most famous natural thermal spa and is indeed said to have been visited by Cleopatra – as well as David Bowie, Sting, Jack Nicholson and Dustin Hoffman. The lake, where we see the pair on a float, is connected to the sea, which gives access to a population of loggerhead sea turtles which are the area’s other claim to fame.
Kaunos
After their visit to the mud baths, we see Calum and Sophie in an ancient amphitheatre, where Sophie leads the other tourists in a chorus of For He’s A Jolly Good Fellow to celebrate her father’s birthday. This is the theatre at Kaunos, about an hour south of Sultaniye, a town with ruins dating back to the Persian empire. Its amphitheatre was built in the Greek period around the 4th Century BC, with capacity for 5000, and remains remarkably well-preserved, despite the slow invasion of olive trees. Sitting in a natural dip above the rest of the city, it looks over the wetlands we see in the film, providing a new vista for the pair to sit alongside the blue skies of Oludeniz.
Aftersun is streaming on MUBI at mubi.com or via Prime Video