Seeking Catharsis: Aftersun (2022) and Why We Like to Watch Sad Movies

Paul Mescal and Frankie Corio as Calum and Sophie in Aftersun (2022)

Claiming the most awards of any other nominated film at the 25th annual British Independent Film Awards, Aftersun (2022), with seven victories out of sixteen nominations, won the acclaim of critics and audiences alike for its gentle melancholy ambience and nostalgic yet masterful production value. A Palm Springs International Film Festival Director to Watch, Charlotte Wells explores in her outstanding debut the complex relationship between father and daughter as revisited through a clouded veil of memory. Combining the delicate themes of joy and grief and the nuances that adulthood brings to childhood memory, Aftersun is all at once rich and profound, subtle and light. 

Though Wells makes sure not to lose the joy of Aftersun, explaining in an interview with AnOther how she removed a lot of tension and conflict from her original script in order to maintain the integrity and brightness of the story at its core, the film is nonetheless remembered for its overwhelming sense of sadness. 

“I didn’t want to lose the joy of it. If I could go back and change anything it might be to make even more joy, to give myself more scenes to work with to capture that feeling, because the grief doesn’t exist without the joy, and the joy is what is most remembered.”

- Charlotte Wells, 2022

Which begs the question: why do audiences love Aftersun so much? A quick scroll through amateur reviews and social media reveals users making statements such as, “this movie destroyed me, I love it,” suggesting that it is indeed the emotional turmoil that a film like Aftersun ellicits that leads to enjoyment, even adoration, of any sad or outright traumatic film. 

Aftersun (2022)

Countless scholars have taken this question in the past and attempted to investigate it in one way or another. From a psychological perspective, researchers find that watching ‘traumatic’ films increases feelings of group bonding and heightens pain tolerance by creating an endorphin boost. In this regard the emotional wringing you experience from tradgedy, in triggering the endorphin system, produces similar effects as laughing, dancing, or working with a group. Put simply, the body uses the same areas of the brain to deal with physical pain as well as psychological pain - the common effects of activities like dancing or reading a sad book are produced through stress, whether they are derived physically or emotionally. 

So perhaps the pleasure in a tragedy is built into our biology, and, indeed, the human penchant for tragedy has existed for centuries: the genre can be traced back to Ancient Greece, from which it’s thrived through several reincarnations from Shakespearean tragedies to the independent filmmaking of today. A 2014 study investigating the pleasure of being moved through aesthetic experiences indicates that viewers of sad media simply do so due to a desire to ‘be moved’. Through a study conducted in an actual cinema where participants were shown film clips as sadness-eliciting stimuli, the authors investigated this age-old and complex emotional state, finding that, whilst there was a significantly high and positive correlation between feeling of sadness and enjoyment of the clips, this enjoyment was almost fully mediated by the feeling of being moved, which, contrary to how sadness is considered to be a negative feeling, was found to be a fully positive experience, wherein sadness functioned as a contributor and intensifier. 

The study also indicates a positive value judgement given the power of a film to elicit such feelings: in an article titled ‘A Strange Kind of Sadness’, author Marcia M. Meaton discusses the philosophical context behind why we love to watch a sad film. She draws on Burke’s theories of the sublime, a concept defined as a distinctive aesthetic pleasure triggered by extremes, such as vastness, difficulty or excessive light, that evoke a certain tension or horror. Meaton emphasises that it is distance that causes what is ordinarily painful or fearful to be delightful, sublime: physical distance allows us to, for example, take great pleasure in the raw power of a storm at sea, replacing the fear we would feel if we were actually endangered by it. 

The feeling of the sublime as such a specific pleasure has been recreated in art by humans for millennia, from the art and poetry of 18th Century Romanticism to the earliest cave paintings of prehistoric times, wherein humanity’s relationship with spirituality and nature were explored as early as 44,000 years ago. It’s logical thus to conclude that in some ways the arthouse films of today are attempting to evoke a sense of the sublime: we naturally admire and appreciate objects possessing great power, and in eliciting real human emotion, we interpret certain sad films as possessing this power - a deeply human recreation of the sublime.

Meaton also places a heavy emphasis on the concept of catharsis. Coined by Aristotle, the term, lacking a concrete definition, has inspired fascination from innumerable philosophers and academics to follow. For Aristotle, catharsis was key to understanding the function of tradgedy, which he posited was to provide the viewer with a unique kind of enjoyment, “[arousing] the emotions of pity and fear in such a way as to effect that special purging of and releif (catharsis) of pity and fear…”. The feelings of pity, fear, or sadness in themselves are not pleasant, and if all tradgedy did was to arouse these emotions, it would not provide us with pleasure at all: “the pleasure, of course, depends upon the relief that the drama provides.”

Aftersun (2022)

A film like Aftersun (2022), raw and understated in its quiet, sensitive artistry, could thus be said to elicit elements of catharsis, and perhaps even of the sublime, in a manner resonating deeply with viewers across the globe:

"I was thunderstruck. It was like a meteor had smashed in through the roof and landed square in my lap, all glowing embers of grief I didn't know what to do with."

                                                                                                            - Alex Denney, 2022

Clever cinematography allows us to be fully immersed in Sophie’s perspective: the frame is often kept off-centre, destabilising the point of view and keeping Calum at a distance indicative of the unilateral relationship between parent and child. Wells deftly weaves coming-of-age elements into Aftersun’s narrative: Sophie is still finding her place in the world, and there’s an inkling of the fact that she does not truly know her father yet - a particularly beautiful scene depicts Calum struggling to remove his cast whilst he talks to Sophie, oblivious, in the other room, whilst shots of Calum at a rave scattered throughout the film build tension as harsh strobe lighting cuts through the darkness to reveal his face before throwing him once again into obscurity. 

Whilst not made explicit, it’s alluded to throughout the duration of the film that what we’re witnessing between Calum and Sophie in Aftersun is final - a sense of temporality, of distance, permeates the entire mood of Aftersun from choices made in both soundtrack and camerawork. Overpoweringly, the airy setting of a holiday-resort, typically regarded as glowing and blissful (if fleeting), exudes the feeling of something about to be lost, in a sense more profound than simply due to fading memory.

Paul Mescal as Calum in Aftersun (2022)

In the crudest regard, Aftersun is a cathartic conquest. The premise of the film in its entirety is the adult Sophie’s journey through grief and emotion as she revisits her childhood: this, paired with the distance kept been Calum and the viewer (as a shadowed figure from the past who is essentially unknowable), and Sophie, who is, young as she is, half-formed, allows for the viewer to both experience the raw and visceral emotions depicted on-screen vicariously but, more significantly, to project their own experiences into the very open narrative created by Wells, making the ultimate catharsis experienced in the closing scenes of Aftersun all the more real. 

The ‘last dance’ between Calum and Sophie, points more significantly still to this notion of catharsis; the link between physical movement and emotional purging is very real, and the result in Aftersun is a potent culmination of grief. Emanating affective intensity, Aftersun provides an explanation for the ‘sad-film paradox’ as it comes to a close: a deep emotional cleasing, it kindles a profoundly human variant of the sublime. There’s a beauty akin to that of standing at the edge of a very tall and jagged cliff, at the mercy of the natural world, in travelling to the depths of human emotion and back again, such that directors like Wells endevour to create. In Aftersun, the viewer is thrust onto the precipice of a vast and emotional abyss, witnessing from afar the ebbs and flows of grief as Sophie experiences them in adulthood, and the result is beautiful.

By Elodie Davies