Sundown movie review & film summary (2022)

Roth's character, Neal Bennett, is on vacation in Acapulco with his sister Alice (Charlotte Gainsbourg), niece Alexa (Albertine Kotting McMillan) and nephew Colin (Samuel Bottomley), in the lap of luxury, as it were. Then Alice gets a call informing them that their mother is gravely ill. The family cuts their vacation short, and on the way to the airport, Alice gets a second call telling her that their mother has died. 

The cherry on top of the misery sundae: when they arrive at the airline check-in counter, Neal shamefacedly says that he's left his passport back at the hotel. Distraught as the family is, they offer to stay at the airport and wait for him to fetch the passport so they can face the tragedy together, on a later flight. Neal assures them that it's better if they go on without him and let him catch up.

Then Neal gets into a cab and tells the driver: hotel. Not a particular hotel: any hotel. And his vacation continues, without the family. He drinks beer and sleeps on the beach. He hangs out in markets and meets a beautiful young woman and takes her back to his room and has sex with her. Days pass, then weeks. His texts and voicemail fill up. His sister wants to know where he is, and if he's OK. He does not respond. Yes, he's lost his mother—but so has his sister, and she isn't abandoning the family in time of need. What's going on here? A need to blow it all up? To reject the privileges accumulated over a lifetime, as other fictional characters, including some of Michelangelo Antonioni's bored rich folks, and Don Draper on "Mad Men," sometimes did?

We are belatedly informed that the siblings are fabulously wealthy, thanks to their co-ownership of pork-rending facilities (though Alice does most of the work, it seems). Around that point, things take a nasty turn, with the Bennetts seemingly being punished, or maybe being subjected to karmic payback. But the misfortune is staged in such a way that we can't be sure if it's the cosmos rearranging itself on the side of the workers and against capitalist piggishness or if the family just caught a string of bad breaks.