motel of the mysteries by david macaulay

Others are much harder, as still and tactile as a rug on the floor. Some of those sources are soft as ghosts, and likewise change shape in the shadows. And yet, personal experience tells us that our pasts are composed from an infinite swirl of different sources - real and invented - each of them crudely sewn together with the same desperation that our sleeping brains might arrange a billion random neurons into a semi-coherent dream.

We tend to think of memories as crystallized moments of time, loosely strung together along the trellises of a drooping chandelier somewhere deep within our mind. Like Sophie, all we can do is sift for meaning amidst the rubble and hope to fill in the haunted spaces between the man she knew and the man she lost.

The eerily objective home videos and the semi-imagined 35mm scenes that “Aftersun” wraps around them both suggest that Calum was struggling with a demon of one stripe or another, and that he was doing his best to hide that struggle from his daughter during their too-rare time together, but Wells denies us the details. Some kids at their rundown hotel assumed they were siblings, and now they would be about the same age.Īs an adult who we only see in glimpses, Sophie rewatches the MiniDV footage that she and Calum recorded on that vacation, eagerly scanning the standard-definition video in search of the clues that a child might have missed. That was the trip when she turned 11, and Calum - played by “Normal People” breakout Paul Mescal, who makes a premature leap into dad roles with tremendous poise and a triggering sense of parental mystery - turned 32. When Sophie (remarkable newcomer Frankie Corio, real as can be) thinks of her father, she thinks of the Turkish holiday they went on together in the late ’90s.

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Motel of the mysteries by david macaulay