If Sebastián Silva hadn’t called his first feature Life Kills Me, it might be an apt title for his latest, Rotting in the Sun. The Chilean director’s work, as always, is an acquired taste, but his no-frills, scrappy aesthetic is particularly well suited to this slippery shot of meta-misanthropy, graphic gay sex and mordant farce. The filmmaker plays a despondent version of himself, subsisting in Mexico City on ketamine and poppers, contemplating suicide until a chance encounter with a brash American influencer and professional party boy kind of derails his plans.
Raunchy, rude and frequently incisive in its targeting of both self-pitying artists and social media celebs, the film revisits many of the director’s customary fixations — eroticism, despair, class conflict, the fragility of life and the allure of death, all of it embroidered with a mischievous thread of absurdist humor.
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Rotting in the Sun
Its appeal to Silva fans will be heightened by his reunion with Catalina Saavedra, the star of his breakout film The Maid, pretty much the only person here not playing herself. She appears as another frazzled housekeeper, Vero, stuck at the center of a spiraling mystery with shades of the HBO series Search Party, on which Silva’s co-star, Jordan Firstman, was a staff writer.
Silva gets right down to it, with his screen alter ego, Sebastián, sitting by the Plaza Rio de Janeiro fountain reading nihilistic Romanian essayist E.M. Cioran’s cheerful collection The Trouble With Being Born.
“Only optimists commit suicide,” reads the text, heard in voiceover. “The optimists who can no longer be optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why should they have one to die?” Given that he falls squarely into the pessimist category, that makes Sebastián doomed to live in torment, according to the book. Nonetheless, he still goes from googling himself to searching for easy ways to commit suicide in Mexico, landing on a readily available veterinary euthanasia drug, pentobarbital.
Just in case the director’s bleak mood isn’t clear enough, Sebastián barely stops his dog, Chima, in time from eating a pile of excrement, freshly deposited in the garden by a homeless man.
Back in the studio where he’s been trying and failing to generate an income as an artist, Sebastián snorts a few lines and disappears down a trippy K-hole. He’s roused by his friend and landlord Mateo (Mateo Riesta), who suggests he take a trip to a cruisy gay nude beach where some anonymous sex in the sun might liberate him from his funk.
But even with the change of location and a passing assortment of penises to stir his curiosity, Sebastián still sits in the shade hiding behind his book. While taking a dip, he tries to help another swimmer in distress, but ends up caught in a riptide himself while the other guy finds his way back to shore unassisted.
That would be social media influencer Firstman, also playing a version of himself, with a healthy degree of self-mockery — not to mention being game to give and receive oral sex on camera. While Sebastián is still shaken from his near-drowning episode, the naked Jordan starts pitching a collaboration on a reality show called You Are Me, about himself and his followers: “It’s like Curb Your Enthusiasm, but positive. And everyone’s the host!”
He invites Sebastián to join him for some fun up on the rocks, where a bunch of guys are having sweaty sex in full view of the beachgoers. Sebastián declines, so Jordan wanders off to be serviced by an eager young superfan of his content. But he reassures the confounded director of their potential project together, “This is real!”
As relentlessly excited and ingratiating as Sebastián is glum and withdrawn, Firstman is a supremely annoying figure, yet somehow irresistible. A chronic oversharer in all senses, he angers Sebastián later that evening at a party by posting a video of the director snorting ketamine on Instagram. (“I was flirting!”)
He seems convinced the two have met before even if Sebastián has no recollection of it. Jordan insists their encounter was fate, since he just watched Sebastián’s film Crystal Fairy & the Magical Cactus the night before. (This really happened while Firstman was on a Grindr date, though he met Silva in the Plaza Rio de Janeiro the next day, not on a beach.) Sebastián quickly loses his patience with Jordan, telling him his social media content is vacuous and calling him a nobody and a clown.
Back in Mexico City, Sebastián is on a Zoom meeting pitching projects to development execs at HBO, who are unresponsive until, in desperation, he regurgitates Jordan’s You Are Me pitch. They love Firstman and love the idea, so Sebastián phones to tell him the collaboration is on after all. Jordan invites himself to come stay at the studio so they can bang out a treatment over the weekend.
That’s where the movie takes a wild swerve. Jordan arrives to find Sebastián absent and becomes immediately convinced that the director and Mateo’s cagey housekeeper, Vero, are conspiring to ghost him. His growing alarm over Sebastián’s whereabouts gains traction — and 25,000 new followers — on Jordan’s Instagram feed, even if his performance artist friend (Martine Gutierrez) asks, “What is this new dark personality? It’s unwatchable.”
Firstman effectively makes himself the butt of the joke by slipping into a full-blown existential crisis in between random hookups, particularly after he finds Sebastián’s journals, full of morbid doodles and lines like “The more you live, the less useful it seems to have lived.” This makes him fear the worst. What’s more, Sebastián’s harsh criticism of him back at the beach keeps echoing in his head, making him doubt his influencer vocation and turn on his followers.
Jordan’s anxiety is undermined by his wardrobe choices and their vapid statements. He wears Melania’s infamous “I Really Don’t Care, Do U?” coat from Zara while flapping through an art event in a state, and then later deals with cops, Mateo, Vero and Sebastián’s newly arrived brother Juan (Juan Andrés Silva) in L.A. streetwear company Prayer’s oversize hoodie and shorts, emblazoned with the words “You Matter. Don’t Give Up.” He’s a product whore suddenly confronted with the emptiness of it all, though it seems doubtful that this realization will last.
Vero’s behavior through all this, ranging from frozen deer-in-the-headlights panic to droll physical comedy, becomes increasingly sketchy as she attempts to cover up the truth without losing her job, or worse. Saavedra makes an inspired straight man to both morose, stoned Sebastián and hyper-chatty Jordan, with whom she has a series of funny miscommunications over Google Translate. The glaring inaccuracies of that tech tool make Vero’s genuine gush of anguish in the end a garbled word salad. But it gives the darkly playful cringe comedy a poignant sting.
Rotting in the Sun ultimately feels slight and overstretched. But with its freewheeling handheld camerawork and characters grounded in skewed reality, it whips up a compelling kind of 21st century madness as it reflects on the solipsistic nature of artists and gay men in a world consumed by shallow pleasures.
