Some evenings I go to sleep with a deep ache, like a hot stone in my gut: the want for a child. Other nights, I barely feel the weight of the stone at all. I’m 32 and my desire for motherhood swings along this familiar pendulum. I'm often left wondering why.
Aftersun (2022, directed by Charlotte Wells) is a visually gorgeous and emotionally brazen semi-autobiographic film about a young girl called Sophie and her holiday in Turkey with her father.
In 2025, it almost swallowed me whole.
Some evenings I go to sleep with a deep ache, like a hot stone in my gut: the want for a child. Other nights, I barely feel the weight of the stone at all.
Back in the nineties, my family holidays were spent at all-inclusive resorts in southern Europe – the kind of places where a receptionist slaps a cheap plastic band on your wrist on arrival. They were greasy things, those holidays; filled with hot sunburned faces, sweat, suncream, all-you-can-eat buffets and screaming children. As kids, we adored them, just as Sophie does.
The film exists in the cavernous space between what we perceive of our parents when we are children, and what we know to be true of them as adults.
Sophie loves her holiday; mainly because she's with her dad. Her adoration bubbles to the surface often – when her dad gently strokes her forehead and they talk about her future. When they dance together. When she films him with his new Sony Handycam, trying to capture something she can't quite understand she's losing.
Aftersun exists in the cavernous space between what we perceive of our parents when we are children, and what we know to be true of them as adults.
Hotel resorts could also be anxiety-inducing places for me. There were dalliances with teenage sex. My older sisters talking about boys. Alcohol. The deep end of the swimming pool. These were things I found frightening – but as kids, our enjoyment was always found at the precipice of danger and the unknown. Sophie is entering that thrilling world, and her father is drowning in it.
As children, our parents are necessarily unknowable. We need our parents to be mythic – strong, certain, permanent. That's protection, but it's also how we metabolise the world. A parent who's visibly struggling, visibly human, visibly mortal becomes terrifying. So we don't look. We can't afford to.
It’s only when we become adults that we see them for who they really are.
We sense by the end of the film that Sophie's father, Calum, is dead – possibly suicide. And, in Turkey, he is struggling profoundly. "I can’t see myself at forty, to be honest. I'm surprised I made it to thirty," he says.
I worry about the gap between who I am as a person and who I'd need to be as a mum.
Sophie films her dad because she loves him, not because she's documenting his pain. She's encoding a mythology she'll later have to dismantle.
She memorialises her father in fragments. She sees now what she couldn't understand then – Calum's distance, his pervading sadness. His refusal to sing with her at the hotel karaoke party. And, perhaps the most difficult moment, the morning she found him passed out, drunk and naked, on their shared bed. The film is also punctuated with glimpses of Sophie as an adult, a baby gently mewling in the background. Sophie is without her father, and is now a parent herself. This is when their internal mythologies convene.
I was born in 1993, so I'm a bit older than Calum in Aftersun. And as a woman in my thirties, I find myself toying with the question of whether I want to be a mum one day. With someone new, as we're walking the fracture line between who we are and what we might become, we talk about the idea of parenthood.
I worry about the gap between who I am as a person and who I'd need to be as a mum. And as I watch my sisters slowly spoon mushed broccoli into disobedient mouths and diligently wipe sticky starfish fingers, I wonder: is motherhood really something I could do too?
Could I ever possibly be good enough?
I find comfort in the transience of childhood. Aftersun suggests there is a safe distance between our childhood and adulthood that enables the imperfection of our parents to persist. Regardless of how fleeting – Sophie's holiday with her dad was significant. And, perhaps because of his immense pain, it was a necessary chapter for her to revisit in her adulthood.
On those greasy holidays with my parents, my sisters and I would pick other holidaymakers and make up silly backstories for them. Over dinner, we'd laugh about Mrs. Flintstone - a German woman with wild hair and leopard print dresses. Madame Lilo - a French woman, always topless, draped across a green lilo.
Maybe we’d have picked Sophie and her dad. Perhaps we'd have thought they were siblings, not father and daughter.
The film ends with adult Sophie trying to reach Calum in a strobe-lit club. She looks at him but he doesn't see her. She wants to hold him close but he slips away. She's pausing and rewinding the home videos, trying to understand what she missed, and trying to forgive him for what came after.
When I think about being a parent, I think about which parts of my life my child will remember when they are an adult. Will my child see me clearly one day? And if they do, will they understand? Will there be a safe distance that enables my imperfection to persist without devastating them?
I think about Aftersun, and how the film feels like adult Sophie reconciling who her father was with who she needed him to be. We know, as viewers, that he won't be there for Sophie much longer. But the holiday was real. The dancing was real. The love was real.
Maybe that's enough. Maybe the gap between who we are and who our children think we are isn't something to fear closing; maybe my fear of my own humanity isn't a reason not to become a parent. Maybe it's just another kind of growing up – for both of us.
Published tomorrow!