TIFF 2021 Coverage: Sundown (2021) - Reviewed

 

Michel Franco's Sundown (2021) is a glacially slow character study where the audience doesn't know the protagonist's motivation for a vast majority of the film. For this reason alone, many might feel unsatisfied when the credits roll, because just like in real life, the destination of this journey is anti-climatic, a culmination of bad decisions and chaos.

A British family is on vacation in Acapulco having a wonderful time taking in the sights and sounds. Neil (Tim Roth) seems to be taking easy, going with the flow, languidly lapping up the atmosphere. His companion Alice (Charlotte Gainsbourg) is a bit more high strung as she has an important job back home that occasionally needs her undivided attention. One morning Alice receives a call that her mother has gone to the hospital and that she needs to return home immediately. 

On their way to the airport she gets even worse news and stricken with grief she hurries to the airport gate. Neil has misplaced his passport and has to catch the next flight. It turns out that he was lying and instead of grabbing his passport he gets a hotel and continues his vacation as if nothing has happened ignoring Alice's increasingly frantic calls to his phone from back home.

The rest of the film follows Neil as he immerses himself into the culture of Mexico, staying in a cheap hotel and engaging in hedonistic revelry. He meets a young local woman named Bernice (Iazua Larios) and enters into a steamy relationship with her. He seems to have unmoored himself from his past life, but why? How can he be so cruel and uncaring as to leave his family during a crisis? Much of the narrative doesn't answer this question, leaving the audience to try to figure out what is going on in Neil's head. Tim Roth puts in an intense performance, drifting from scene to scene like a ghost, existing only to indulge in pleasure and never acknowledging the problems in his life.

Franco said that he made this film during the pandemic and I can't help but wonder if the idea of quarantine bled into the subtext of Sundown. As this situation has gone on almost two years people have had to adjust and keep on living life and going to work like nothing is happening even with numerous people getting sick (and some dying) around them. We as a society have been trying act like things are normal when they are not, and Neil is basically doing the same thing in this film. When Neil's motivations finally are revealed, it is uncertain if it justifies his actions but it does illuminate how fragile life really is and how few joys we have left to savor.

--Michelle Kisner