Neil Bennett is enjoying a nice holiday at a Mexican resort with his sister, Alice, and her two teenage kids. They’ve got the sea view and the infinity pool and a hotel entertainer to sing for them over supper. Then all of a sudden, disaster. The phone rings; their mother’s dead. So Neil does what any sensible son would do in his position. He pretends he’s lost his passport and therefore can’t fly home for the funeral. The woman’s dead anyway, so what does she care?

Sundown shows Neil’s decision, then proceeds to stroll alongside him like an innocent party. It’s an approach that makes the film all the more blackly comic.

No sooner has Neil shoved tear-stained Alice and the kids through the departure gate than he’s away in a cab, bound for downtown Acapulco. Now he’s holed up at the rackety Hotel Camelinas, not taking calls, just living the dream. When Alice returns, a full fortnight later, she finds him drinking on the beach with the new girlfriend he picked up at the local bodega. As played by Charlotte Gainsbourg, Alice speaks for all of us. Her mouth drops open; she throws up her hands.

This of course is the film’s million dollar question. What on earth is wrong with Neil? Is he sick in the head or an out-and-out sociopath? It turns out that the Bennetts are the fabulously wealthy heirs to a meatpacking business; their lavish holidays funded by industrialised slaughter. But Neil mildly explains that he has no interest in money and is content to survive on a relatively small monthly stipend. He’s unperturbed by his sister’s fury, just as he barely bats an eyelid when he witnesses a gangland execution on the beach. He came to Mexico to relax, after all. At the Hotel Camelinas he appears to have achieved full nirvana.

What an extraordinary performance Tim Roth gives us here, insofar as it qualifies as a performance at all. He ambles through the tale with a placid half-smile, his shoulders slumped, his flip-flops dragging; a hollow man who desires nothing more than to be left alone with his nothingness. So what if he skipped his mum’s cremation and lied to his loving family? He shrugs like a husband who forgot to put out the recycling. All in all, Sundown is pitiless and pitch-perfect, an existential tour-de-force.

– Compilation