Sundown

Tim Roth and Charlotte Gainsbourg star in Mexican director Michel Franco's latest transgression, an original and mysterious drama with many unexpected twists. Roth is superb as Neil Bennett, a wealthy Briton spending a carefree vacation with his sister (Gainsbourg) and her family at a luxury resort in Acapulco, Mexico. A phone call disrupts the sunny idyll. Their mother has died. Instead of accompanying his sister back home, Neil moves into a budget hotel, drinks beer on the beach, meets a local beauty and makes up reasons to delay his return. What is Neil up to? How long can he stay away while his family grieves and struggles with legal matters? And what if things go from bad to worse…? ‘Clearly it’s wrong to laugh at Michel Franco’s brilliant “Sundown” but I’m afraid that I did all the same—several times while watching the movie; several more times when remembering it afterwards. It’s the funniest film in [last] year’s Venice competition, also maybe the nastiest… It’s pitiless and pitch-perfect, an existential tour-de-force with shades of Camus’s “The Outsider”’.—Xan Brooks, The Guardian