Sunset is a 2018 drama about a small and diverse group of people who grapple with the imminent probability of a terrible end.
You’re most likely looking at the title of Sunset and the accompanying image of two elderly people and thinking you’ve already got the movie figured out, but let me assure you, you don’t. While aging might certainly be a major link to the themes at play here, they are not quite as developed as you would expect, the film a much darker and somber story of something altogether different: nuclear armageddon.
I remember back in the 80s there was a rash of films, with the excellent Nicholas Meyer television drama The Day After perhaps the most prominent, about the possibility or aftermath of nuclear war at the hands of the Soviet Union, the Cold War fodder for endless entertainment even as we all sort of wondered how true any of it might actually be. As enemies and threats have shifted, global annihilation has nonetheless remained a steady plot device in movies, and adding to that heap is this, Jamison M. LoCascio‘s Sunset, a small independent film that is purposefully contained, asking some tough questions, even while limited by its production.
Coming home from an evening out, elderly couple Henry (Liam Mitchell) and wife Patricia (Barbara Bleier) join a few friends and family to celebrate her birthday. Among them is Julian (Austin Pendleton), a former colleague of Patricia’s who clearly harbors some deep-seated affections for her. Hanging over the night though is events from a few weeks earlier where terrorists set off a small rogue nuclear bomb in Los Angeles, triggering immediate and devastating conventional retaliation in the Middle East. Now, threats loom, and there is concern that more is coming, and when a credible strike over the New York Metropolitan area prompts a massive evacuation, Patricia decides to stay, along with a few others and now they must wait out what could be their last sunset.
What begins as a stout debate on ‘them versus us’ between Henry and Julian quickly evaporates as the film makes a dramatic shift into the humanity of what it all means. LoCascio and fellow screenwriter Adam Ambrosio avoid making a statement about the politics driving the plot, instead focusing on reflection and fear. Henry and Patricia have been together since high school and now, decades later, Patricia especially, who has suffered a leg injury years before that limites her mobility, is unwilling to move on, ready to accept whatever fate this crazy world now has in store.
Henry works as a handiman with man-child Chris (David Johnson), a sort of underdeveloped fellow who has become their ‘adopted’ son and isn’t entirely aware of what’s going on. There’s also friends of the couple Ayden (Juri Henley-Cohn) and his girlfriend Breyanna (Suzette Gunn), both far younger who also stay behind, and the film skips around these people as they try to make peace with what seems entirely unavoidable.
The thing that works best in these kinds of movies is the reality in possibility. Many of us can still recall the morning of September 11th, 2001 and feel within ourselves a dreadful sense of change, that this would be the start of something out of control, the chaos of it all making the world seem off its axis. That’s the point behind the escalation in Sunset, where people face even worse. The world has gone mad and as such, the film is a mostly hopeless experience, maybe purposefully so.
Sunset is not a film about effects, what little the filmmakers do to give any sense of scale to the story made through archival footage and off camera audio clips. That leaves it to the cast in convincing us of the drama and for the most part, deliver, the small production feeling often like a home video journal of the possible end of times. There are a few well-earned emotional moments and some genuine suspense as it comes to its end, having us wonder what it would really be like and that’s probably the film’s greatest achievement, it’s final minutes not without some punch.
Sunset releases July 3 on Amazon, iTunes, Xbox, Google Play, DVD and more.