The reviews are splendid. Heart-stopping. Best film of the year. You won’t walk away the same person. Masterful. Stops you in your tracks.
Well no, it doesn’t. What it does have is a very delicate sense of mystery. Sophie is an 11 year old girl who lives in Glasgow with her mother. Her father lives in Turkey, although I was a little confused if he lived in London and was just vacationing in Turkey. Whatever the case, he doesn’t return to London after his daughter visits him and they stay at a resort for roughly 10 days and do all of the boring things people do at resorts.
Spoilers from here on.
But her father Calum, played by Paul Mescal who is masterful, clearly has some issues. We don’t get to learn what demons are plaguing him, but periodically we see him — barely see him — dancing in some sort of club. The strobes are timed so far between and the light is too fast to really see him well. There also seems to be some sort of man looking at him. We don’t really know what this place is or what he’s doing there.
There are no cell phones, but there are other features of modern or a more recent era, like the micro video recorder he is using to record some details of their vacation together, and the movie opens in the dark with the sound of a mini cassette being placed into the recorder and the typical “dinging” sound that Sony recorders made. This is another clue as to what this movie is actually about, because it is not what it seems to be — a somewhat uninteresting vacation between a man and his 11 year old daughter. At some point, he turns 31 on this trip. And later, we see a man — presumably Calum rushing down to the sea in the middle of the night, fully clothed, and running in. He doesn’t emerge. In the next scene he’s in bed, naked and she’s been locked out all night. She doesn’t cringe — she just covers him up.
There is also some things going on between her and some older “kids” — teenagers — who are doing a lot of kissing and stupid things that teenagers do. But really, for most of the time, I kept thinking about the father — because he’s the adult — and he seems tortured. At times I thought that maybe he was gay and had HIV. Then I would abandon that and think, oh, he’s got some other terminal illness. But there was a palpable sense of mystery.
It isn’t until 3/4 of the way through that we have what seems to be a flash forward: Sophie, on her birthday, at age 31. She’s waking up next to her wife or girlfriend, and a baby is crying. The girlfriend says, “Happy birthday Sophie,” so we know it’s her. But still, the major flaw of this movie, is that we don’t understand until the very end that it’s all been a flashback. The adult Sophie has been watching her father’s tapes and, at times, imagining some of what must have gone on that made this visit the last time she saw him. Certain things are out of order, like her imagining his suicide, and the final scene is of him having just waved goodbye to her, shuts off the videotape recorder and walks down an airline hallway and into what appears to be the discotheque we kept seeing him dancing in. The reason I see this as a flaw, is that you can’t actually be moved by something unless you know what it is you’re watching — unless you get the very basics, which is that the adult Sophie is trying to understand her father on the day that she turned 31, the age when he killed himself. This is a twenty year old memory. And yes, it is devastating, once you know that the charming little girl was waving goodbye to a father who was going to kill himself a bit later. I feel like the reviewers who called it masterful and said you won’t leave the theatre the same person, had some sort of fore-knowledge about what the story really was.
This, for example, is the plot according to Wikipedia. “A woman reminisces about embarking on a summer vacation to Turkey with her father during her childhood.” That would be nice if that’s what was actually filmed. That first part: “A woman reminisces,” is not the movie we’re given. The line should be, “An 11 year old girl embarks on a summer vacation to Turkey with her father.”
Flash forwards are interesting devices, but in this case, if I had known that this young woman Wikipedia is talking about, was trying desperately to understand her father’s depression or demons, or what made him kill himself, it would, in fact, be a devastating picture. How can you turn 31 and be happy when that was the age your father killed himself. Hitchcock always said, “Tell the audience everything.” This movie holds so much back, and although I liked it, and the acting was tremendous, I just feel like it missed the ball and it didn’t have to. Still, she’s a great writer and director and this movie is winning awards all over the place, so bravo.