Review: Rotting in the Sun

Director:  Sebastián Silva

Stars:  Jordan Firstman, Catalina Saavedra, Sebastián Silva

After the confinement of the pandemic, a number of our more interesting auteurs on the world stage seem eager to return to the beach. As a result, 2023 risks turning into the year of strange summer holidays, from Christian Petzold’s slippery Rohmer-adjacent reflection on artistic bankruptcy Afire to Sebastián Silva’s raucous return Rotting in the Sun.

Where Petzold used proxies to play out his drama of neuroses, Silva playfully fills frame as a version of himself, coasting/cruising Mexico with suicidal ideation when he dramatically rescues vacuous Instagram influencer Jordan Firstman (also playing – hopefully – an exaggerated version of himself) from drowning. Firstman, ecstatic and off his face, wants to collaborate with Silva on a high-concept web series that he likens to Curb Your Enthusiasm, but his aggressively irritating tics and pranks repel the dubious Silva… that is until the execs at HBO get interested.

But what begins as a knowing, rambunctious satire of influencer culture and Grindr fuckboys takes a sudden swerve into the darkly absurd. A ballsy mid-film twist skewers Rotting in the Sun closer to the tone of Larry David’s metatextual car-crash sitcom than previously seemed likely, and Catalina Saavedra comes to the fore as Silva’s long-suffering housemaid Vero.

Silva’s affinity for the provocative and abrasive is in full flow here. He gleefully zooms the camera toward any bare dick in the vicinity, catches dogs taking shits or licking giant used dildos, dwells on vomiting and revels in the most grating tendencies of Jordan’s ‘extremely-online’ persona (something that the game Firstman throws himself into with positive gusto). It’s a similar couldn’t-give-a-fuck spirit one finds in the work of Harmony Korine. Silva’s cinema, however, is often even more agitated, fascinated by sensibilities that seem to offend or rile, captured in the rough-hewn frenzy of handheld that mirrors the harsh wrist-swerves of self-shot material on social media. Rotting in the Sun feels erratic but displays clear forethought. It is calculated, considered and often riotously funny.

While the title takes on a grimly literal meaning, one senses that Silva also intends it as an evocative summation of our cultural decline as the climate rises – our apocalypse of stupidity – yet he doesn’t place himself above the mess. Instead he’s right in the midst and the mire of situations often of his own making. “Suicide isn’t funny”, Jordan berates him, just after making a poor joke about it, following this up with the darkly perfect airheaded summation “Suicide isn’t great”. But Rotting in the Sun also seems to make serious connections between queer culture and suicide, suggesting – beneath its dastardly smirk – that there’s something endemic worth acknowledging and talking about.

Firstman and Saavedra both ultimately carry this chaotic and entertaining stress dream across the finish line in a journey filled with communication breakdowns and frenzied attempts to evade culpability. In this sense it is as smartly savage as the best of Curb or even the more farcical end of Frasier. It’s one of the year’s edgier comedies. While Silva takes potshots at everything from Instagram to pretentious art openings, he also offers one of his most balanced efforts since the under-appreciated Magic Magic. Rotting in the Sun is explicit, indulgent and thrillingly unpredictable, and marks a welcome return thanks to these very qualities.