Sundown * * * *

There is a tale of morality here, but it is subtle. 

An English family are holidaying in Acapulco, in a resort that only the very wealthy could afford. One afternoon, they receive a phone call that requires them to return home.  The old matriarch of the family is dying.  Alice is devastated.  Neil takes it calmly. 

At the airport Neil announces he cannot fly as he  he doesn't have his passport with him. He tells Alice and the two teenage children to go on ahead.  He will catch the next flight and still be back in the UK for the funeral.  Then he catches a cab from the airport and tells the cabbie to take him to an hotel - any hotel.

Neil responds to my review.

He checks into a cheap hotel and then we realise he was lying about the passport.  He still has it.  He spends the next few days sitting on the beach drinking beer.

He meets an attractive woman who runs a shop near the hotel.  They strike up a friendship that soon leads to intimacy.  He tells her he is not married - are these more lies?  Soon we will find out. Meanwhile the phone calls are coming from England: Why aren't you here?, Alice demands to know.  Richard, their lawyer, encourages him to come home. Neil tosses his phone into a drawer so he can't be bothered anymore.

His conduct is a mystery to us:  Is he okay?: He has visions of pigs on the beach, visions of Alice standing over him and interrogating him with a bodyguard in tow. 

Then in reality, Alice does come back to challenge him.  She reminds him he has responsibilities.  They have a large successful business to run.  In reply he tells her he wants to walk away from the business: she can have the lot, he tells her.  He asks for a modest stipend only.  She leaves, angry and disgusted.

Then something unexpected and extraordinary happens to Alice.  Neil is deemed a suspect and is thrown into a prison in Mexico.  He does not panic or even seem to care that much.  The British consul try to help, his lawyer tries to help, but it takes time for a hearing and he is stuck there in a Mexican prison, caged like an animal. The meaning of that becomes more apparent as the film progresses.  

When Neil is released his lawyer want to take him to the airport and straight back to the UK, but Neil gets out of the car to return to his cheap hotel, his new Mexican girlfriend. visions  of dead pigs, and a sense of foreboding that his own demise is imminent.

So... what's it all about?   Sundown is a strange but subtle story.   It's a film where scenes become clear after the event.  Anticipation takes second place to disturbing realisations.   Especially when you slowly learn the true relationship with Alice and her children, and what their shared successful business is based about, and the futility of Neil returning to the UK.