Sundown: Uncertainty Exalts Director Michel Franco’s Singular Mexican-Set Drama

By Kim Hughes

Rating: A-

There is a gnawing ambiguity to Sundown, Mexican writer/director Michel Franco’s follow-up to 2020’s hair-raising New Order and about as far away from that film’s spectacularly dark, dystopian vibe as it’s possible to get. Reaction to Sundown, with its ‘could be this, could be that’ outcome is likely to be just as polarizing if substantially less controversial.

Indeed, where New Order broadly surveyed and compartmentalized Mexico’s upper and lower classes, Sundown pretty much rests its entire narrative on one man, wealthy British business owner Neil Bennett — played with few words but (oxymoron alert) riveting impassivity by Tim Roth — who comes unglued, maybe, in the self-imposed aftermath of a family vacation in Acapulco with his sister Alice (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and her two adult children.

The film opens with Neil, Alice and the kids enjoying the languor and warmth of Mexico in their very posh hotel. A phone call announcing a family emergency disrupts the splendour, and the family is soon headed to the airport to return home.

Once there, Neil announces he has forgotten his passport, and must miss the flight while he retrieves it. Alice and the kids go on without him. But rather than returning to the luxury hotel, Neil instead allows a chatty cab driver to divert him to a run-down dive managed by a friend. There, Neil seems to sink effortlessly into endless, shapeless days of drinking while lazing on the beach.

Despite his family’s increasingly urgent attempts to contact him and have him return home, Neil folds deeper into the crevices of life in Acapulco, starting an affair with a local woman, Berenice (Iazua Larios) while permitting himself many thousand-yard stares.

A plot development late in the film raises the possibility that there is more at play with Neil’s mental state than merely existential angst. In the short-term though, Neil seems to… if not revel then certainly relax into his newfound role as a wealthy expat schlub.

Gleaming pools and sweating beers notwithstanding, this is Mexico, so brutal gun violence marks two climactic scenes in Sundown, one with grave consequences for Neil and his family, before the film veers left, introducing unexpected action as crises are confronted. Sundown dissolves with a conclusion that doubles down on the narrative uncertainty cultivated to that point.

As might be expected for a film set in Mexico City and Acapulco, Sundown is drenched in bleaching sunlight, which acts as a visual counter to the turmoil hovering over Neil and the others in his midst.

Throughout it all, Neil’s obvious and presumably sudden detachment — from his family and the successful business they run, his fortune, his lover and eventually even himself — feels wearying. Which may be Franco’s point: Inertia is a kind of movement, especially if it draws us away from a life that weighs us down.

Sundown. Written and directed by Michel Franco. Starring Tim Roth, Charlotte Gainsbourg, and Iazua Larios. In select theatres including Toronto’s TIFF Bell Lightbox April 8 and VOD/Digital April 29.