Poor Tim Roth. One of our great character actors, Roth makes almost every movie he is in better. So it’s about time he got his leading man due. I just wish it wasn’t Sundown which wastes another great Roth performance on a film that’s…not as great as him.
Roth plays Neil, a man on vacation in Acapulco with his sister Alice (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and her two kids Alexa (Albertine Kotting McMillan) and Colin (Samuel Bottomley). After a terrible phone call, Alice has to fly home to England unexpectedly. She wants everyone to go with her, but Neil forgets his passport, and stays in Acapulco for a day or two more, until he can catch a direct flight back.
Sundown on its surface is a puzzle film. A pretty fun one too. Immediately, everything feels off with Neil: content to do nothing while everyone else is bopping around. He feigns interest in Alice and the kids, but he seems more interested in just hanging out on a beach and getting a Dos Equis from a cute, younger store owner Bernice (Iazua Larios). As Alice becomes frazzled, and more worried about Neil and when he’s coming home, Neil just turns off his phone most of the day to lay on that beach, grab a beer from Berenice, and flirt with her a little. But it gets weirder because there’s army guards around the beach for some reason, ominously lurking in the background, and Neil seems to actively court more and more danger as the movie goes on. Every time you think you’ve figured the story out, Sundown pivots with something big, or small, to throw you off its scent again, until the very end where everything snaps into place for the most part, with Tim Roth holding this strange story together with his quiet prodigious talents.
The problem though, is that puzzle is surface level. If you go even a little bit below the surface, the movie unveils rotten parts that just get more rotten as you think about them. I’m not talking about the characters here: it’s ok that Neil is a douche and Alice is aggressively needy. But the way Sundown reveals information, the most important thing is upending audience expectations and making them uneasy. This makes every character except Neil impossible to pin down, as their reactions to some of the ludicrous actions he takes don’t make any sense until the end, meaning you really don’t give a crap about anyone except hating Neil more and more. There’s also an ugly racial undertone here, portraying Mexicans as either violent buffoons/criminals to scare non Mexicans, or sex objects for the white tourists to use to their heart’s content. God bless Iazua Larios, but the only character trait she’s given is super hot. And while the ending does finish Sundown’s puzzle, it does so while taking advantage of every lazy racial shorthand in the book, and comes off more pretentious and condescending than revelatory.
Even though Tim Roth is the best part of Sundown, it almost feels like the movie would have been better with a Mexican lead, or taking place on a super sexy British getaway destination. As is, the movie is equally compelling and off-putting, destined to become either a cult classic or hate watch for years to come. And again, Tim Roth doesn’t deserve this: maybe this is his punishment from Marvel for being a part of arguably their worst movie? Let’s get Tim out of movie jail, please.