Critic Reviews

Right from the superbly framed opening scene of Kostis on the ferry, the visuals satisfy with their unerring sense of composition.

It is superbly directed and shot with great scenes.

Replete with sometimes startling imagery...Suntan captures a set of very specific feelings: the exhilaration and embarrassment of falling, followed by the desperate denial that one has landed in a very bad place.

A deftly handled cautionary tale, there is a compulsive, creeping horror to this portrait of a man losing all self-respect. That said, it is frequently a tough watch.

Structurally, there’s little that’s new in Suntan. The tale of a middle-aged man delusionally pursuing youth and beauty reaches back to Thomas Mann and beyond. But Papadimitropoulos has a feel for the physicality of this world, for contrasting postures and gestures.

Argyris Papadimitropoulos struggles to lift his material out of a downbeat mode of cringe comedy.

While Suntan is more than just a tale about an older man becoming involved with a younger woman, it's unfortunately not as profound when it later claims to be a statement on the movie you think you're watching.

A professionally mounted but bluntly misanthropic character-study, the director's second solo outing wallows in the worst of human nature with little reward at the end of a mechanically inexorable downward spiral.

The story might have had some thematic heft if we knew or cared anything about the characters. But all we can glean about the disastrous Kostis is that he’s had hard times, while Anna is a total cipher.