Charlotte Gainsbourg | ASSHOLES WATCHING MOVIES

Neil (Tim Roth) is just another millionaire on vacation in Mexico with his sister Alice (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and her children when his (well, their) mother dies. Alice of course returns home immediately to start making arrangements, but Neil fakes a passport emergency to stay behind. Why would Neil do that? Well, Neil’s not much of a talker, and believe me, his sister asks, REPEATEDLY. But all Neil wants to do is sit on the beach and drink Coronas out of a never-ending, tourist-priced bucket.

Well, drink beer, and fuck the locals, if we’re being perfectly frank. Bernice (Iazua Larios) in particular. She’s pretty happy to sit and drink beers with him, but the life he left back home is a little more exigent. If he was rich before, he’s now much richer; his wealth comes from some big company back home that’s now officially passed down to the next generation, to his, to him and his sister. Only Neil seems to have opted out. He hasn’t said it out loud, he just won’t engage and he won’t go home. He’s on perma-vacation.

Writer-director Michel Franco knows that life has a habit of catching up with us all. Even money can’t insulate us forever. Maybe money makes us particularly vulnerable.

Sundown features a very cool Tim Roth, maybe not at his Rothiest, but relaxed into a character stripped down to essentials, editing out the bullshit, but whose background is complex and whose life waiting at home is brimming. Unfortunately, I don’t count this among my favourites at TIFF this year. The writing wasn’t as clear as it needed to be; I spent the first bit of the film sorting out its basic elements, and then reassessing the film once I’d made some rather large adjustments. Crucially, it also lacked proper motivation. Man walks away from life. Okay, sure, that happens, in film as in life. But why? Neil is up to his eyeballs in privilege and wealth; has a very cushy life .He’s trading it in for a simpler one. There must be some reason for this, but Franco doesn’t want us to know it, doesn’t even want us to ask. Neil’s life is further wrinkled by the Mexican justice system. You can be sure he’ll call on all his resources to iron this out for him, but while this does introduce some conflict, it fails to culminate in any sort of reckoning.

Sundown is a movie without a message. Tim Roth can’t find meaning where it doesn’t exist. There are ingredients there, and while I admire a film maker who refuses to follow a recipe, I’d still like those ingredients to be mixed and baked. Franco leaves them raw. Sundown is watchable but ultimately pointless.

Everybody in the whole world dropped dead on Tuesday afternoon. They seem to have died suddenly, no pain or suffering or foreknowledge, on the toilet or in front of the TV. Del (Peter Dinklage) was asleep when it happened. When he got up to work his night shift at the library, everyone else was dead. He is alone, utterly alone.

Del has spent the last however many months or years methodically cleaning out the houses in his town. He is respectfully burying all 1600 residents. He tidies their homes, scrounging commodities like batteries and gas, and empties their refrigerators. Entropy is why: one less case of chaos in the universe. Then he searches for unreturned library books, marks the house, and leaves it behind, unsentimentally, ready for the next one. Sure he’s alone but so, apparently, was he in his life before.

MV5BMTk4MjM3NDUyMV5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwNTU4MzgyNDM@._V1_SX1777_CR0,0,1777,744_AL_ You’ll never guess what’s coming. Okay, I bet you already have, more or less. Grace. Grace (Elle Fanning) is coming. She careens into his town one night and refuses to leave. That he wants her to is interesting, isn’t it? They make a grudging peace, but his solitariness is destroyed, and Grace, of course, is a big ole blob of chaos herself. But she challenges him in unexpected ways. He’s been able to manage this post-apocalyptic world because he didn’t lose much. Grace has lost everything – family, friends, lovers. She thinks Del is cold.

Of course, Grace is not as forthcoming as she’s presented herself. Who knew the end of the world could get so complicated? I wasn’t crazy about the tonal twist in the end and I’m not sure why the screenplay by Mike Makowsky veers off so dramatically when it’s been so low-key up until then. I like a script that has he space to leave some questions unanswered. And Peter Dinklage is very good at filling in the gaps. The opening scenes, largely dialogue-free, are not unreminiscent of a human version of Wall-E. But we get a sense of our solitary man, how comfortable he is with the routine. He’s alone, but he’s not lonely.

If I had some problems with the story, I had none with how I Think We’re Alone Now looks. Director Reed Morano, before she got her Emmy for directing The Handmaid’s Tale, was a cinematographer on films like Frozen River. She was the youngest person admitted to the American Society of Cinematographers and 1 of only 14 women (out of approximately 345, yuck). Morano’s the real deal, and so much of Del’s world looks incredible. I love what the camera will linger on, I love which colours are emphasized and when. I just wish the story delivered on the film’s promise.