Rotting in the Sun (2023)

Direction: Sebastian Silva
Country: Chile 

While relaxing in a Mexican gay nude beach, Chilean filmmaker Sebastián Silva meets American comedian and social media influencer Jordan Firstman, who is a fan of his movies. Despite Silva’s initial reservations, they agrees to an artistic collaboration. The two personalities feast on caricatural portrayals of themselves and mock death in this shaggy-dog meta-narrative called Rotting in the Sun. The true standout in the movie is Chilean actress Catalina Saavedra, who skillfully reprises her role as a morally-resistant maid - a character that garnered critical  acclaim in Silva’s second feature, The Maid (2009).

The film unfolds in two distinct halves, and unfortunately, neither proves satisfying. The first part comes off as gratuitous, fixating on the visibly depressed director engrossed in Romanian author Emil Cioran’s book The Trouble of Being Born while contemplating existential struggles and suicide. It’s also pelted with drawn-out, unsimulated sex scenes that add absolutely nothing to the plot. The second part takes a bleak turn, dealing with real death and disappearance, and adopting an investigative and slightly more thrilling tone. However, it fails to shake off the programmatic nature that plagues the narrative.

Silva's direction falters while striving to shock the audience at every juncture, and the repetitive scenes never compensate the lack of ideas. What could have been a provocative satire ended up feeling excessively simulated, derailed by an uncontrolled impetus that only makes it further rigid and cold. In the end, the uninspired director delivers a poor reality-fiction hybrid that proves challenging for the audience to engage with. Unapologetically unpleasant, the film feels stale, like it has been left to rot in the sun.

Tyrel (2018)

Directed by Sebastian Silva
Country: USA

Tyrel is a totally missed shot by Chilean director Sebastián Silva, whose past releases alternate between the delightful (The Maid; Crystal Fairy) and the mediocre (Magic Magic; Nasty Baby).

We’re living complicated times where racial tensions keep escalating and symptoms of fear, anxiety, and violence are visibly abundant. Aware of all this, Silva wrote a plot that is conceptually logic and unequivocal, a sort of counterpoint to Jordan Peele’s Get Out that would likely lure more adepts if less diffuse in the message and more consistent in tone.

Jason Mitchell is Tyler, an African American young man who willingly joins his good friend John (Christopher Abbott) in an all-men weekend party in the Catskill Mountains. This opportunity will give him a break from certain family problems that have been bothering him lately.

The house where they’re going to stay, owned by John’s Argentine friend Nico (Nicolas Arze), suddenly becomes jammed with a bunch of peculiar white dudes he doesn’t know. While some of the guys are nice, like Alan (Michael Cera) or Max (executive producer Max Borne), others are somewhat provocative in their behavior, cases of Peter (Caleb Landry Jones) and Dylan (Faith No More keyboardist Roddy Bottum). Frivolous conversation leads to silly games; alcohol leads to weed; everything starts rolling at a fast pace. Despite of a Trump doll hang in the living room and ready to be wrecked by torture, Tyrel becomes notably uncomfortable for being the only black person in the house.

The first night was tense, yet pacific; the second, maddening wild; both were prosaically banal. In our heads, we portray all those guys as racists and sadistic bastards ready to devour Tyler just for their own amusement. But nothing ever really happens and we feel somewhat betrayed by the pointless situations created. This sense of futility and deception was magnified from the moment I noticed that, after all, movie title and main character don’t share the same name - former is Tyrel, latter is Tyler.

With our alcohol-drenched hero programmed to act in paranoia mode, the film takes us to a neighboring house, where Silvia (Ann Dowd), her saxophonist husband (Reg E. Cathey), and their kid meet an afflicted Tyler. Are they the friendly type?

There is probably more religious turmoil here than actually racial, and the story progresses with a nonsensical self-contentment without delivering a single thrill. It doesn’t take us too long to understand Silva’s idea, in the same manner that we realize that the aimless script is populated with under-written characters. Tyrel breaks at the weight of its own ambition, feeling like an undergraduate exercise in tension. Sadly, even that tension is wasted.