The meaning of “ghosting” has changed since the term entered the popular lexicon in 2015. At first, it meant the practice of ending established relationships by dropping all communication, sometimes blocking people on social media platforms, changing your number, or even moving away without warning. In the years since, it’s been applied to much tamer behavior, as everything from not texting back after a couple of unexciting dates or ignoring a DM from a long-forgotten classmate can get you labeled a ghoster.
Leave it to Mexican director Michel Franco to reclaim the word as an act of truly drastic abandonment. He’s re-teamed with Tim Roth, star of his earlier Chronic, for a drama that pushes the idea of ghosting to a brutal extreme. Of course, it looks tame compared to the ugly provocations for which Franco is known—including the empty nihilism of his last movie, New Order.
Sundown begins with a seemingly happy family on vacation. Tim Roth plays Neil, spending his time lounging by the pool and day drinking with Alice (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and Alexa (Albertine Kotting McMillan) and Colin (Samuel Bottomley). The food, drinks, and accommodations are all the height of luxury, tiny gongs sounding as elegant cocktails are served next to infinity pools. It takes a few scenes to even establish that the family is in Mexico, given the total absence of national signifiers.
A few days into the trip, a phone call brings news that the family matriarch has taken gravely ill and that everyone needs to return to London immediately. Alice is devastated—Franco, utilizing Gainsbourg’s peerless ability to seem hollowed out by sadness, has her crumpled and sobbing on the rush to the airport. Neil, on the other hand, barely raises an eyebrow, even when the news gets worse. His behavior, a relaxed numbness, takes a turn for the unusual. At the airport, he pretends to have left his passport at the hotel and promises to catch the next flight back to London. Instead, he jumps into a cab and gets dropped off at a cheap hotel by a crowded beach. Rather than make any attempt to join his family, he deposits himself on a plastic chair by the shore and makes his way through a bucket of beers while the ocean laps at his feet.
Days go by and the phone calls become increasingly frantic. Neil placates the family at first with promises that he’s making arrangements with the consulate, but eventually cuts off all communication and settles into a routine in a modest town outside of Acapulco. True to Franco’s form, this isn’t a journey from a good life to a bad one, or vice versa. Both worlds that Neil occupies have grotesque elements, while the relationships he has in both have moments of warmth but are punctuated with mercenary trade offs. While the resort is lit to make its luxury look cold and oppressive, the alternative is far from charming local authenticity: Armed police patrol the beach where Neil spends his days, there to control the regular and intense violence.
Neil, meanwhile, barely reacts to the begging phone calls he receives and ignores, expressing no remorse about cutting off his nearest and dearest without explanation. And though he chooses to stay in Mexico and start a relationship with Bernice (Iazua Larios), who works at the store where he picks up his late-night beers, he never seems in love with her or even particularly interested in what she has to say. Roth plays virtually every scene with the same slack-jawed blank expression.
There is, of course, more going on with Neil than meets the eye, more than the rich-guy ennui of being the middle-aged heir to a billion-pound slaughterhouse empire while nursing a serious drinking problem. As the explanations emerge, so does Franco’s knack for nastiness, along with some interesting flourishes and striking imagery around flesh and meat. But the reasons themselves lessen the impact of Neil’s seemingly inscrutable actions, and though they somewhat justify his flatness, but it’s still tedious to spend even 83 minutes with the guy.
Sundown has more substance, and a more intriguing premise, than most of Franco’s proudly sadistic work. But it still amounts to just a lot of artfully composed bleakness: peeling skin, bleeding corpses, freshly caught fish slowly dying as their gills fill with air. As the film peters out with more of a whimper than a bang, it’s hard not to feel ghosted. Rather than respectfully end his relationship with the audience, Franco just stops picking up the phone.