Sundown

A wealthy English family is on holiday in Acapulco when news arrives that their mother has died. Everyone takes the next flight, but at the airport Neil says he has lost his passport, goes back, and checks into a cheap hotel. He explains himself to nobody. The film is not interested in grief. It is interested in complete withdrawal: he does not look sad, makes no plan, punishes no one; he simply lets go of everything that belongs to his life. A piece of information at the end explains the behaviour, but Michel Franco delivers it late and coldly. The form is distant: long takes, little dialogue, ordinary scenes on the beach. Violence cuts in abruptly a few times and is never underlined. Franco's cinema is generally built on class and violence, and here the family fortune comes from a meat business in Mexico, which the film does not defend for a moment. Tim Roth plays Neil, Charlotte Gainsbourg his sister. Who it is for: viewers who like cold contemporary cinema that refuses to explain. Who it is not for: anyone who needs to understand a character's motivation. The protagonist says almost nothing throughout, and for some viewers that makes the experience entirely empty.