Review: 'Sundown' is a fast and sharp study of a man at the end of his rope, with a strong performance by Tim Roth

The latest drama from Mexican director Michel Franco, “Sundown,” is quite fascinating and a little bit frustrating, a character study of one man apparently deciding to chuck it all.

Neil Bennett (Tim Roth) and Alice Bennett (Charlotte Gainsbourg) are wealthy British siblings, on vacation at an Acapulco resort with Alice’s grown children, Colin (Samuel Bottomless) and Alexa (Albertine Kotting McMillan). The vacation is cut short when Alice gets a call that their mother is dying. After rushing to book flights and pack up, another call on the way to the airport informs Alice and Neil that their mother has died.

At the airport, Neil tells Alice that he’s forgotten his passport back at the resort. With the flight boarding in minutes, Alice and the kids rush to the plane, and Neil says he’ll catch a later flight once he has his passport.

Here is where the movie makes a sharp turn into mystery. Neil doesn’t go back to the resort, but instead books a room in a cheap hotel near the beach. When he opens his suitcase, we can see that he had his passport with him all along.

Franco — whose last film was the Mexican political thriller “New Order,” where a rich family gets caught in a revolution — writes the script for “Sundown” in the opposite direction from most films. In other films, writers would lay bits of information like land mines, and the audience anticipates when they’ll go off later. With Franco’s script, those bits of information are withheld for an annoyingly long time — but when we get them, it makes Neil’s behavior suddenly make sense.

Roth gives a strong performance, as a man seemingly chucking it all and starting over. It’s a role that is predicated on the audience knowing little about Neil and receiving eyedropper amounts of information as we go along, and Roth keeps the mystery alive from start to finish.

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‘Sundown’

★★★

Opens Friday, February 4, in area theaters. Rated R for sexual content, violence, language and some graphic nudity. Running time: 83 minutes; in English, and Spanish with subtitles.