Critic Reviews

That Silva achieves to both criticize the overuse of online personas (particularly in the white gay world) while becoming a piece meant to be meme-d and TikTok-ed into oblivion is truly remarkable.

You almost wish there was a little more magic, but that’s maybe because some of the truths Silva comes up close to are so skin-crawlingly real that you want to cover them up.

As ever, Silva’s filmmaking — formally rough on the surface, carefully worked out underneath — depends on the steady upending of expectations. Social media is phony but potentially revealing. Bodies are hot and sexy until they’re gross and inconvenient. Jordan is insufferable, the worst kind of self-entitled Ugly American, but also endearing, perceptive and admirable in his tenacity.

It’s a film which sets up a lot of easy targets, but shifts its aim at the last second to take on – and bullseye – a whole lot of hard ones.

More than a casual swipe at modern social trends, Rotting in the Sun exposes a kind of cruelty, alienation, and social stratification that is only as modern as the technology through which it expresses itself.

It takes a shock to the system to draw honesty out of an influencer, and Rotting in the Sun is absolutely a shocker. But rooting himself in the fabrication-friendly space of social media leads Silva, and his film, toward an earnestness that outmatches even his best work to date.

At once an excoriating satire of the performativity of homosexuality within a social media-addled community as well as a seemingly earnest lament for the total loss of collectivity, the film minces neither words nor bodily appendages.

For all the dicks of varying turgidity on proud display, it’s the intimations of true insecurities that leave these characters most nakedly exposed.

Although Rotting in the Sun isn’t revelatory about how little those in the higher echelons of society think about the tribulations of average people, the movie’s forceful way of expressing it achieves its presumed goal: to punch up and mock the fools.

Rotting in the Sun ultimately feels slight and overstretched. But with its freewheeling handheld camerawork and characters grounded in skewed reality, it whips up a compelling kind of 21st century madness as it reflects on the solipsistic nature of artists and gay men in a world consumed by shallow pleasures.