Things are not always as they appear. In Mexican writer/director Michel Franco’s SUNDOWN, Tim Roth and Charlotte Gainsbourg play members of a family on vacation in Acapulco, Mexico, in a suspenseful drama where things are not always what they seem.
While the Bennett family – Neil (Tim Roth), Alice (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and teens Alexa (Albertine Kotting McMillan) and Colin (Samuel Bottomley) – vacations at a posh beach side resort, their pleasant holiday is interrupted by a family emergency back home in London. Alice is distraught at the news, while Neil’s reaction is muted. At the airport, Neil tells the family he forgot his passport back at the hotel. But rather than delaying everyone, he says he will go to back to retrieve it and then catch the next flight, while the rest of the family boards their hastily-arranged flight back home to London. After they depart, Neil grabs a cab but instead tells the driver to take him to a hotel, any hotel, instead of going back to the resort.
So what is going on and what kind of person is Neil? Those are questions that intrigue us and keep us guessing in this mysterious, suspenseful drama. While he spins excuses to Alice on the phone, Neil extends his vacation, spending his days on the beach, drinking Dos Equis, eventually taking up with a woman at a nearby shop, Berenice (Iazua Larios).
Neil’s behavior is puzzling, even cold-hearted given that there is a funeral to arrange back in London. But we also sense sadness, maybe desperation, in his low-key demeanor. Not to give too much away, but director/writer Michel Franco is slyly playing on assumptions he knows we will make. More is going on here than it first seems, and as the film unfolds, more is revealed, along with some shocking events.
The director wrote the film specifically for Tim Roth, with whom he has worked before in 2015’s CHRONIC. Franco’s work has been compared to Michael Haneke’s and SUNDOWN is an understated film with unsettling undercurrents, with Roth playing a character who reactions are both puzzling and muted. At under an hour and a half, the film’s deliberate pace isn’t an issue but it also brings in some shocking twists and sudden violence, while weaving in issues of crime, violence, income inequality and class divides in contemporary Mexico.
Roth’s character Neil is the central puzzle of the film, a complicated, multi-layered one. As we wonder why he behaves as he does and what is really going on with him and his family, things make more sense as we learn more about the family. While we can see the family is clearly affluent, it is eventually revealed they are very wealthy and the owners of slaughterhouses.
That unconventional puzzle is set against a backdrop of some unsettling, sometime shocking events, although both the filmmaker and the character keep everything at arm’s length, which all feed into what is really going on with Neil. The reason, or at least the explanation, for Neil’s behavior becomes clearer by the film’s end, but as the story unfolds, the questions keep us involved and wondering about what is next and that seemingly passive, preoccupied guy at its center.
Roth gives a subtle, affecting performance, filled with a vague sense of sadness and distance, that on re-watching gives clues to what is happening with Neil from the start. At first, Neil appears to be sociopathic but even before we understand more about what is going on with him, it is hard to dislike him, because he projects an underlying despair and he is so mild and asks so little of those around him. We are infuriated and puzzled by his behavior towards his family but are shocked further when he hardly reacts when a man is shot next to him on the beach, showing neither fear nor concern, only surprise. Tensions are high when Neil draws the attention of some shady characters, who casually sit down uninvited at his table at a beach bar and grill, seeming to size him up for robbery or a con.
While Roth’s Neil is all passivity, Gainsbourg’s character is the opposite, verging on hysteria at the bad news from home, growing impatient and then angry at Neil’s behavior, demanding and constantly calling and texting him. The family lawyer, Richard (Henry Goodman), becomes a go-between and a source of insight on the family for us.
SUNDOWN constantly plays on our shifting assumptions while Roth slowly crafts the character, but unfolding events reveal the story, and insights on life in Mexico, the wealthy Bennett family, and what is driving Neil. Nothing is simple, as perceptions shift while we go down this mysterious, ultimately heartbreaking hole.
With its strange central character and willingness to unsettle its audience, SUNDOWN is a film that won’t appeal to every taste. SUNDOWN can be challenging but it is a brilliantly crafted film with much to say about people and the state of modern life in Mexico, and elsewhere for that matter, with a sparkling but subtle performance by Roth, which make this suspenseful mystery drama well worth the effort.
SUNDOWN opens Friday, Feb. 4, at Landmark’s Plaza Frontenac Cinema and other theaters nationally.
RATING: 3.5 out of 4 stars
