Aftersun (2022)
Directed by Charlotte Wells
Return to Seoul (2022)
Directed by Davy Chou
Rounding (2022)
Directed by Alex Thompson
In Alex Thompson’s Rounding, a Chicago-adjacent production, a young medical resident moves from an urban hospital to a rural one, hoping to escape the ghosts of his past. Dr. James Hayman (Namir Smallwood) remembers the instigating event vividly, as he euthanized a patient pleading for their end, only for that patient to seemingly regret the request when it was too late. Thompson, a filmmaker of some local renown following the modest critical success of his 2019 dramedy Saint Frances, is operating in a vastly different genre and I’m not certain if it suits his sensibility. Then again, nothing about Saint Frances felt genuine either. As the film progresses, Hayman’s reliability as a narrator becomes suspect, as he assumes responsibility for a young patient named Helen (Sidney Flanigan, in her first role since her excellent performance in Never Rarely Sometimes Always; she’s profoundly underutilized here). Hayman suspects Helen’s mother to be poisoning her daughter, though he has little evidence to support the theory. His mind begins slipping away, and his integrity as a physician is called into question.
Rounding offers some minor thrills for a lifelong Chicagoan, insofar that it features many actors I’m vaguely familiar with. Smallwood, for example, was featured in the Steppenwolf Theater’s most recent run of Bug, replacing Michael Shannon’s role. He has an awkward, edgy presence that made his performance in Bug memorable, or at least notable for escaping the large shadow that Shannon casts. But here he’s oddly muted, with Thompson offering him little with the role. While the premise of a would-be physician trying to make peace with a mistake that haunts him would seem compelling enough, Thompson’s instincts to infuse psychological/supernatural components just seem superfluous and unconvincing, especially as the film reaches its agitatingly saccharine and unearned conclusion.
If Rounding was about escaping your ghosts, Davy Chou’s Return to Seoul is about confronting them. This sometimes thoughtful, sometimes clumsy narrative is my first experience with Chou. I appreciated the initial passages of the film, as we follow Freddie (Park Ji-Min), a French-raised woman in her twenties, returning to Seoul to find her biological parents after they gave her up for adoption. We learn a lot over bottles of soju, as she befriends the hostel administrator and quickly hookups with a Korean boy that immediately becomes infatuated with her. Freddie connects with her father initially, a lout with a family of his own. Conversations with him are filtered, as Freddie communicates in English to her father’s sister, who translates in Korean. It’s a fractured relationship, with the father’s enthusiasm to reconnect combined with his traditional notions of Korean culture scarring Freddie off.
Divided into three distinct chapters, I found Park’s performance to be the notable highlight that keeps Return to Seoul afloat. The clumsiness I suggested primarily comes from the screenplay’s jarring dialogue and ill-defined relationships that seem to mean more to the characters than what’s being observed by the audience. But seeing Park transition from detective to a lost and disconnected soul when her past doesn’t offer her the meaning she anticipated was exceedingly impactful. Whenever I go on a trip, I watch the Bojack Horseman episode “The Dog Days Are Over”, which features Diane visiting Vietnam, her birthright. It’s an episode that offers comfort and validation in the unknowing; to be ok with not finding some cathartic answer to life’s lingering unanswerable questions. Return to Seoul’s about accepting that, and how it’s not a linear progression. There will be stumbling blocks and it’s easy to spiral back into patterns of selfishness and anger. But the ghosts of the past will always linger; it’s about living comfortably with them, side-by-side.
Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun, one of the year’s best films, left me sobbing buckets. It’s a ghost story about a woman remembering a notable holiday retreat as a preteen with her absent father. Sophie (Frankie Corio) gets confused as Calum’s (Paul Mescal) brother early in the film, as the two vacation at a resort in Turkey. Wells emphasizes the ephemeral, the subtle glances Sophie makes toward the teenagers that orbit the grounds, with a distinct sense that this holiday will be formative to who Sophie will become. The initial passages fixate on the malaise of being a kid and not really understanding the nuances of what’s going on with the world, but Sophie’s preconsciousness is both endearing and propels the narrative in interesting places. Meanwhile, Calum’s presence teeters between friend and father, with him struggling to make the distinction while owning up to his absence in Sophie’s life. He’s a nomad, someone who left the place he was from, and struggles to find a spot in the jigsaw puzzle to fit in. The love he has for his daughter seems genuine, with my anxieties that the film would be a tumultuous exercise in neglect akin to The Florida Project quickly subsiding. Instead, Wells acknowledges the ever-fraught nature of men and women leading complex lives that don’t subscribe to traditional normative values. Or to put it plainly: reconciling what you should do versus what you want can lead to people fending for themselves.
The analogues here are numerous, everything from Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight to Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas make up the DNA of Aftersun. Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir films also informed a lot of my viewing. But ultimately, it’s the combination of the 90s milieu and its music, the way Wells interjects with the past and present, miniDV footage, and Mescal’s positively soul-crushing performance that makes this all the more affecting and stands up shoulder-to-shoulder with those aforementioned giants. I like to pretend that I don’t believe in ghosts, but this one is positively haunting.