On the strength of one film, Frankie Corio is an actor worth watching. As Sophie in Aftersun (2022) she does almost nothing you could call acting, and her face carries the whole weight of what the film will not say aloud.
Fi1m perspective
A girl sits at a table in a Turkish resort and her father will not get up to sing with her. She goes up alone. In Aftersun (2022) Frankie Corio sings the song small and flat to a room of sunburnt strangers, and she does not push a note, and we found it hard to look at, because a child is being braver than her parent and both of them know it. That is the scene most people remember, and rightly, but it is not where the performance lives. It lives in the watching.
Charlotte Wells's first film is built on the distance between what Sophie sees of her father Calum (Paul Mescal) on holiday and what she will understand about him later, and Wells does not put that distance into dialogue. She puts it on Corio's face. Sophie watches the older teenagers kissing in the pool; she watches a boy her own age across an arcade pool table; she watches her father when he thinks she is not. Corio was cast at ten from an open call of around 800 Scottish children, with no experience and, by her own account, no wish for any: "I had not been trying to get into acting". It shows, in the best way. There is none of the trained child's habit of reaching for the emotion and holding it up for inspection. She lets Wells's camera come to her.
The honest caveat is that this is a body of work with one film in it. Since Aftersun she has played Emily in Bagman (2024), a supernatural horror, and Eilidh in Morven Christie's short Stray (2025), neither of which we have reviewed, so we will not pretend to judge them here. Some have worried aloud that a debut this exact might be the only thing she is remembered for. We understand the worry. A performance that works because a child does not know she is performing is not a technique you can pack and take to the next job; the next job needs a different kind of acting, and we do not yet know whether she has it.
What we do know is that opposite Mescal, an adult actor in a part that could have swallowed the film, she made the film hers. Sophie is the one the story is about, and Corio never once asks to be liked for it. If she does nothing else, Aftersun stands. If she does more, we would like to see it.
Biography
Frankie Corio, also credited as Francesca Corio, is a Scottish actress. Born on 7 July 2010 in Livingston, West Lothian, she made her screen debut as Sophie in Charlotte Wells's film Aftersun (2022), opposite Paul Mescal.
Corio was cast at the age of ten from around 800 applicants after her mother submitted a photograph to a casting agent. The film was shot in Turkey. She has since appeared as Emily in Bagman (2024). Corio has received several award nominations for her performance in Aftersun, including for the Critics' Choice Movie Awards and the British Independent Film Awards.
