The Guardian by Xan Brooks

It’s pitiless and pitch-perfect, an existential tour-de-force with shades of Camus’s The Outsider.

San Francisco Chronicle by Mick LaSalle

It’s an inward-looking film that seems to be saying something about life. Whatever it’s saying — and it’s not clear that it’s saying anything specific — it connects. It’s not just another good movie. Somehow, it all adds up as something more important.

Original-Cin by Kim Hughes

Where New Order broadly surveyed and compartmentalized Mexico’s upper and lower classes, Sundown pretty much rests its entire narrative on one man, wealthy British business owner Neil Bennett — played with few words but (oxymoron alert) riveting impassivity by Tim Roth.

Slashfilm by Chris Evangelista

The genius of Sundown is how little it tells us while keeping us glued to what we're seeing.

Movie Nation by Roger Moore

Like the master big screen poker player than he is, Roth never ever shows his cards.

The Associated Press by Lindsey Bahr

Ultimately, “Sundown” is more of a spiritual sister to “Melancholia” with shades of “Somewhere." It is a portrait of a body whose soul has long since departed.

Film Threat by Alan Ng

Tim Roth is great as Neil.

Screen Daily by Lee Marshall

There are moments when, like the gaudy lights of Acapulco, Sundown flickers into something rather special when seen from the right angle, in the right mood: a film about a goodbye to life which is also a film about a kind of afterlife.

Variety by Peter Debruge

Yes, Sundown is a mystery, but it’s also a Rorschach test. No two people will see the film the same way.

Los Angeles Times by Robert Abele

In one sense, Sundown is a bleak window into the corrosive effect wealth and privilege have on relationships and the psyche, and even with a final reveal that fills in some of why Neil is the way he is, it still doesn’t feel that explanatory. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing for this taut, confidently unsettling film.

TheWrap by Jason Solomons

Its intensity burns like the sun which makes Neil’s skin blister, peeling off a layer we hope might reveal more. Franco is scratching away at the surface, too, making the sort of movie you come away from with questions, wondering if you’d blinked and missed something.

The Playlist by Carlos Aguilar

Sundown doesn’t subvert what we’ve come to expect from Franco’s work, but it is still a distinctively cerebral rumination.

IndieWire by Nicholas Barber

Roth’s expressions range from slightly dazed to slightly drunk, and so, as the days drift by, Sundown becomes a liberating blend of mystery and existential deadpan comedy.

The Film Stage by Jared Mobarak

The result is an introspective character study caught against a gorgeous yet volatile backdrop. While I personally believe the payoff is worth the journey, however, I wouldn’t begrudge others for feeling as though they’ve been jerked around.

The Hollywood Reporter by David Rooney

As a character study of a man with good reason to wean himself off the very basic human instinct of hope and teach himself, even at some personal cost, to care for no one and nothing, Sundown gains texture from its stark setting in a seaside playground stained with blood. But of all the director’s films to date, this might be the most airless.