While on Vacation, a Man Makes an Unexpected Decision

Tim Roth in "Sundown"
Photo Credit: RottenTomatoes.com

Writer-director Michel Franco’s latest drama, “Sundown,” begins in an unassuming way where he shows the ordinary happenings concerning a family at a resort and their time spent together.  However, what Franco ends up presenting us is something with so much more below the surface.

The story follows a man named Neil (Tim Roth) who decides to abandon his family when on vacation.

Roth, who starred in Franco’s film, “Chronic,” offers a subdued performance that invites us into Neil’s psyche, presenting someone who seems to be giving up on everything to make his life simpler.  He’s trying to escape from his family, but the way in which Roth carries himself leads us to believe that there’s something else going on that’s causing him to act this way.  Through the film, Roth doesn’t even talk that much, often keeping his responses short and letting us study him through his facial expressions and how he moves throughout the setting.  There’s a mix of melancholy and easement that Roth brings to Neil, and it’s this that helps make Roth’s character a mystery to solve.

Franco’s screenplay doesn’t unfold in the manner you might think.  Once everything is slowly set up in the first half, the second half has your expectations come undone, resulting in a movie where nothing is as it seems.  Even if you think not much happens in the first half, that storytelling choice makes sense later on as you learn new things and the motivations of the main character become clear.  There are things that can be open to interpretation, even in some of the smaller aspects, and this is what contributes to the film’s tension and unexpectedness, leaving you to want to go back and re-examine both the major and minor details.

During the simple events of the first half of the movie, Franco does what he can to establish a lingering, inescapable dread to carry us through this section, slowly preparing us for the second half, where new layers begin to unfold.  He teams up with his frequent cinematographer, Yves Cape, who worked with Franco on “New Order,” “April’s Daughter,” and “Chronic,” providing camerawork that doesn’t employ complex movements.  Instead, the duo uses simple tracking shots and a stoic camera to match the initial and unsettling straightforwardness of the story, a straightforwardness that’s soon shattered.

To add to the stripped-down nature of the filmmaking, Franco doesn’t use any musical score.  Rather, he relies on the sounds and music of the setting.  This allows us to become absorbed in the environment as Neil takes it all in, giving us the chance to pay full attention to everything that’s occurring in the streets that Neil traverses and in the places that he visits.

From the tranquil opening few minutes to the haunting final image, Franco brings us on what feels like a full journey for Neil’s character, despite the movie being less than 85 minutes.  This may be a short movie, but there’ll be long discussions afterwards.

Grade: A