This recently Oscar-nominated film by Charlotte Wells has been on my ‘to watch’ list for a while, after I saw a trailer at the cinema. It follows a depressed 30-year-old on holiday in Turkey with his 11-year-old daughter, from whose mother he has separated. It is set some time in the 1990s, I think, with camcorder footage spliced into the film at times.

Later, it is revealed that the film is from the perspective of the daughter after she has grown up. She is looking back at her memories of her dad as she reaches the age that he was on this holiday. We’re left to ponder whether her memories are accurate.

It is a very personal film, one where not much happens, but the power is in the (mostly unexpressed, mostly repressed) emotions of the piece. Paul Mescal and Frankie Corio give astonishingly natural performances throughout. Wells also plays with the cinematography in ways that underline and support the unspoken emotions: some sequences are bright and dreamlike, others have characters sometimes seen only at the edges of frames.

And yet… for whatever ineffable reason, whether to do with the film, or the conditions in which I watched it, or my mood at the time, or some combination of things… it didn’t emotionally reel me in. I felt like I was watching a film, not like I was involved in the characters’ lives. It felt a bit consciously clever to me, at a remove from the viewer.

I wasn’t quite as taken with this film as were many of the professional reviewers, but I still enjoyed it.