Modern Classic: Sundown (Michel Franco, 2022)

Sundown is a subtle drama with some thriller aspects, written and directed by Michel Franco, that takes place in Acapulco. It’s about a middle-aged man, played by Tim Roth, who is nearing the end of his tether.

Mexican filmmaker Franco first broke through to international audiences with his movie Chronic (2015), which also starred Tim Roth, about a home care nurse who works with terminally ill patients.

Since then Franco has made movies like New Order (2020), which dealt with class war in a very violent way, and most recently the troubled love story Memory (2023), with Jessica Chastain and Peter Sarsgaard.

Sundown, the movie I’m talking about here, was selected for the competition at the Venice Film Festival in 2021, before playing the international festival circuit and arthouses around the globe.

It is about a wealthy British family of four who are enjoying their vacation in Acapulco, until they are called back to London by some terrible news.

At the airport, middle-aged Neil Bennett (Tim Roth) discovers that he has left his passport at their luxury hotel, so the other three have to fly home without him.

Then something strange happens: Neil takes a taxi to a more decrepit part of town, checks into a fleabag hotel, then goes to the beach, sets himself down in a deckchair and takes a beer. And another, and so on, until he is drunk as a skunk.

Is Neil having a mental breakdown? Facing an existing crisis? Or has he simply lost the ability to cope and/or care? The next couple of days he forgets about his passport and just gets on with his life, befriending an attractive local woman, Berenice (Iazua Larios), and hiding his phone in his room, so he doesn’t have to take calls from his increasingly worried family anymore.

Slowly but surely writer and director Franco reveals more information about Neil and his family, who accumulated their wealth by exploiting a company of slaughterhouses, memories of which still haunt Neil’s vision.

He also seems strangely oblivious to violence, until something really extreme happens around the midway point.

For most of the movie Neil seems a mixture of privilege and guilt, not caring about money like only someone with loads of it can. And perhaps not realizing that a surplus of money might pique the interest of less privileged people.

To emphasize his universal loneliness, Franco mostly captures Neil in wide shots, and when he does close in on his lead character, it’s usually from behind.

When in the final stages of the movie, the most likely reason behind Neil’s behavior is revealed, it takes something away from the mystery, but not too much. It gains something as well, as thematically it suddenly fits right in with some of Franco’s earlier movies.

Sundown is an intriguing character study, that also works as a portrait of quiet despair, filmed against the good-looking backdrop of a sun-filled seaside town.

Roth (who had worked with Franco twice before) is excellent as Neil, while both the experienced Charlotte Gainsbourg, and youngsters Albertine Kotting McMillan and Samuel Bottomley offer able support as his relatives. Excellent yet perennially underrated character actor Henry Goodman (Avengers: Age of Ultron) also shows up as the family’s lawyer.

Sundown (originally called: Driftwood) is an understated movie, that packs a powerful punch.

I give it four stars!

Note: Sundown is available to watch through various platforms like Prime Video, Google Play and Apple TV.