Critic Reviews

It’s pitiless and pitch-perfect, an existential tour-de-force with shades of Camus’s The Outsider.

It’s an inward-looking film that seems to be saying something about life. Whatever it’s saying — and it’s not clear that it’s saying anything specific — it connects. It’s not just another good movie. Somehow, it all adds up as something more important.

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.

The genius of Sundown is how little it tells us while keeping us glued to what we're seeing.

Ultimately, “Sundown” is more of a spiritual sister to “Melancholia” with shades of “Somewhere." It is a portrait of a body whose soul has long since departed.

Like the master big screen poker player than he is, Roth never ever shows his cards.

Yes, Sundown is a mystery, but it’s also a Rorschach test. No two people will see the film the same way.

There are moments when, like the gaudy lights of Acapulco, Sundown flickers into something rather special when seen from the right angle, in the right mood: a film about a goodbye to life which is also a film about a kind of afterlife.

Tim Roth is great as Neil.

In one sense, Sundown is a bleak window into the corrosive effect wealth and privilege have on relationships and the psyche, and even with a final reveal that fills in some of why Neil is the way he is, it still doesn’t feel that explanatory. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing for this taut, confidently unsettling film.