Movies like Aftersun

Why it's similar — Woody Allen's 1978 family drama operates in the same withholding register Wells uses — a Bergman-influenced study of a family in slow emotional collapse where the central crisis is never named in plain terms and where the camera's restraint is the film's primary moral choice. Both films treat depressive interiority as something that has to be observed sideways rather than dramatised head-on, and both refuse the closure of explanation.

Why it's similar — Gina Prince-Bythewood's 2008 adaptation of Sue Monk Kidd's novel works the same coming-of-age-in-the-shadow-of-a-missing-parent register Aftersun is built on, and the rhyme is the use of a single intensely-textured location (a South Carolina farm in one case, a Turkish resort in the other) as the closed memory-chamber inside which a child's growing-up happens. Both films are interested in how the warmth of a season can hold a much darker thing.

Why it's similar — Bruce Beresford's 2016 Eddie Murphy drama walks the same memory-of-a-vanished-caretaker terrain Aftersun maps — a young girl looking back as an adult woman at the man who looked after her in her childhood, with the audience asked to read the relationship at two registers at once. The rhyme is the framing device of the adult narrator who knows what the child did not know yet.

Why it's similar — The Coen brothers' 2013 portrait of a struggling folk musician at the end of his rope works the same depressive-interiority register Aftersun does — a film about a man whose internal weather is not legible to the people around him and whose self-presentation keeps slipping out of his control. The rhyme is the tonal commitment to ambient sadness as an aesthetic rather than as a plot beat.

Why it's similar — Alan Yang's 2020 directorial debut works the same memory-of-a-young-father terrain — a Taiwanese-American daughter trying to reconstruct her father's young-man interior life across two countries and several decades. The rhyme is the use of intergenerational memory as the film's structural device; both films cut between a father's earlier life and a daughter's present attempt to read it.