Aftersun
“When you were 11, what did you think you would be doing now?”
When my daughter was born this past September, I knew nothing would ever be the same. Nobody properly prepares you for the first time you hold your child. The unwavering love, the excitement of getting to watch them grow, the feeling of wanting to become a better man for them. This little girl deserves the absolute best version of me, why is why I feel so guilty when I’m not the best version of me.
An unexplainable sadness when she smiles at you, loneliness piercing through even with your wife and daughter sleeping in the bed next to you, the feeling that you’re not enough even when the way she snuggles up to you tells the opposite story. These feelings don’t make you less of a father or man, they make you human. I get to watch this little human learn and grow, but I have to continue to learn and grow at the same time, which is both beautiful and terrifying.
Charlotte Wells displays these feelings in one of the most beautifully crafted films of this decade. Paul Mescal plays a father who tries so hard to be the man his daughter thinks he is, and not let the demons that existed long before her stop him from doing so. Frankie Corio plays a daughter who is trying to put together the broken pieces of her father and understand that while she was a kid experiencing life for the first time, so was he.
Fatherhood has already challenged me so much. It’s the most terrifying, difficult, beautiful, and rewarding thing I have ever done. Fatherhood doesn’t automatically turn you into the perfect man, it breaks you down and builds you up in ways that you have never experienced before. But as the great Jon Bellion says, a present father is worth way more than a perfect dad.