Starring: Tim Roth, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Iazua Larios, Samuel Bottomley and Albertine Kotting McMillan
Distributor: Kismet Unit Trust
Runtime: 82 mins. Reviewed in Jul 2022
Reviewer: Peter W Sheehan
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This dramatic film tells the story of Neil, a wealthy man, who abandons his family and children after the death of his sister’s mother. In the future that unfolds around him, he reliably abandons anyone to whom he is attached.
Written and directed by Mexican filmmaker Michel Franco, this film explores the personal crises of Neil Bennett (Roth), who presents to us first as a taciturn, reserved man. Neil is vacationing in Acapulco with his sister, Alice (Gainsbourg), and her two children, Colin (Bottomley) and Alexa (Kotting McMillan), who are heirs to a highly successful British meatpacking business. While on holiday, there is a phone message saying that his sister’s mother is ill, and then a second call saying she has died. When he arrives at the airport, he tells his family that he has left his passport back at the hotel and will go back to get it and then take the next plane home. His family departs without him, but he stays in Acapulco, and ignores his family’s pleas for him to return. In Acapulco, he forms an attachment to Berenice (Iazua Larios), and after some weeks, a drive-by gun shooting occurs while he is in her company. Alice comes back to Acapulco and accuses Neil of abandoning her. As before, Neil rejects her. On her way to the airport to return home, Alice is shot and killed, and Neil is arrested by the police, who think he was responsible for her death to acquire her wealth. Back in his hotel room, Alexa in frustration attacks Neil, and shortly after, he is diagnosed with brain cancer. Reunited with Berenice, and with her sleeping next to him, Neil gets up quietly and walks out into the night alone, through the streets of Mexico City, again abandoning those to whom he is attached.
Neil’s personal crises consistently lead him to abandon and reject, and Tim Roth interprets and occupies the complex character of Neil commandingly. This is a bleak film which says significant things about the corrosive effect of wealth and privilege on personal relationships. Neil obviously influences those around him, but when the order of Neil’s world is disrupted, chaos descends, that arouses personal tensions. Those tensions ultimately destroy his relationships and any sense of belonging he might have had to those around him.
This is a deeply introspective film that looks at humanity from the internal perspective of a person who is disturbed. Neil has reason to hope, but cannot do so. He is thoroughly selfish, and he cares nothing about the people who care for him. He is a man who rejects wealth and privilege that has been accumulated over a lifetime, and he shows total disregard for the suffering of others. The film’s bleak scenario, however, carries a significant warning: Neil’s behaviour confronts viewers with the awful effects that can occur when humanity goes terribly wrong.
The film contrasts wealth with social squalor, but that contrast is never really resolved. The viewer is left with the choice of relegating responsibility for what takes place to personality aberration, or to social disorder: Is Neil Bennett seriously disturbed because of his lack of feeling and human response, or has social division taken control of his feelings? Both are relevant. The strength of the film is that there is no simple explanation to what is wrong with Neil. Being labelled disturbed is too simple, and being part of a malfunctioning society is too incomplete. The film is an unnerving account of a privileged individual, who has learned not to care. It is about a person from a splintered family who has learned to walk away from responsibility. This is a film that powerfully tells us what can happen when duty and responsibility are no longer seen to be relevant.
The movie sparingly uses dialogue. It is an observant, well-controlled film about life on the downside, where morality, positive feeling, empathy, and social order are all relevant. The film ends confrontingly. Despite all that has happened, the film’s final moments tell us that Neil will simply continue with his self-inflicted isolation and desolation. This is a film that offers a masterfully directed testimonial to the tragedy of lack of human connection and the need to belong to others.
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