The Brooklyn Rail

Class-conscious black comedy Rotting in the Sun immediately paints a macabre portrait of pervasive societal disparities, opening with houseless people digging through trash cans for scraps, senior citizens relying on N95 masks for safety, and buskers catering to wealthy tourists in a run-down public park in Mexico City. Amidst this chaotic scene, we turn towards a man engrossed in Emil Cioran’s The Trouble with Being Born. “If you’re doomed to live in torment, nothing can keep you from it—any trivial thing will push you as much as a tragedy,” he reads aloud. “Resign yourself to decay at all times. That is your fate.”

Resign he does. Rather than reflecting on or engaging with the consequences of income inequality, the coronavirus pandemic, or gentrification—phenomena he is keenly aware of—the reader chooses to decay, wallowing in the facile confines of his book or surrendering to a brain-numbing bottomless pit of absurdist content sludge.

Some might recognize the reader’s copious consumption of inane videos and memes as an attempt to emotionally distance himself from an endless deluge of global disasters, a practice many have picked up over the last seven years. In Rotting in the Sun, the subject partaking in this unhealthy coping mechanism is writer-director Sebastián Silva… playing the semi fictionalized role of Sebastián.

Like the real-life Silva, the film’s Sebastián is a gay Chilean film auteur in his mid-forties. Uninspired, cynical, and above all, deeply insecure, Sebastián spends his waking hours doom-scrolling, wasting away in his room, and imagining his death. However, Silva comedically undercuts Sebastián’s ideations with dramatic passivity, showing Sebastián Googling suicide methods between snorts of ketamine and attempting to sell his eclectic art (read: cursory allusions to New Age spirituality and cartoonish phalluses on canvasses and his walls). When he isn’t wallowing in self-pity, Sebastián exchanges barbs with his long-suffering studio assistant Vero—played by the brilliant Catalina Saavedra, whose casting here is a subversive callback to her starring role in Silva's 2009 film The Maid—and his building’s noisy contractors. His closest approximation to a friend is his landlord, the equally abrasive Mateo (Mateo Riestra), who half-jokingly encourages Sebastián to kill himself at the gay nudist beach Zicatela.

When Sebastián arrives at Zicatela, he feels estranged from his far more outgoing and promiscuous fellow beachcombers, avoiding the gaggles they form at parties and orgies. A near-death experience introduces Sebastián to Jordan Firstman, who is also portrayed by his real-life counterpart. Jordan, a millennial influencer made famous by his surface-level comedic Instagram reels, goads the established Sebastián into facilitating his Hollywood debut, the half-baked reality television show You Are Me (which Jordan describes as “Curb Your Enthusiasm, but positive”). Sebastián initially rebuffs Jordan’s pitch, irritated by Jordan’s overbearing personality and shameless opportunism, but his latent fear of obsolescence, and even worse, becoming “poor and [therefore] pathetic,” compels him to accept. When Sebastián mysteriously disappears from the film about forty minutes in, it is up to Jordan to put together the pieces of his absence with maniacally optimistic aplomb.

Silva’s ingenuity as a writer, director, and actor aside, Rotting in the Sun is a byproduct of collective trepidation and anger towards former US President Donald Trump’s administration. More specifically, Rotting in the Sun’s brand of comedy recalls the humor of Rian Johnson’s murder mystery Knives Out (2019), whose wealthy white characters hide behind liberal talking points while upholding and actively participating in the same hierarchies of classism embraced by Trump. Knives Out signified a watershed moment in late 2010s political commentary, differentiating itself from the mass of film and television productions that more overtly represented Trump in the immediate aftermath of his election. The popularity of Knives Out, coupled with Bong Joon-Ho’s acclaimed thriller Parasite (2019), established the conventions and staying power of early 2020s-era “eat the rich”-themed satirical black comedies, prevalent in projects like Mike White’s The White Lotus (2021–present), Mark Mylod’s The Menu (2022), Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness (2022), Kristoffer Borgli’s Sick of Myself (2022), and even Brandon Cronenberg’s horror film Infinity Pool (2023). The coronavirus pandemic further solidified the public’s appetite for fantasies of retribution against those who appeared to emerge from it unscathed.

Rotting in the Sun avoids the fictional over-the-top strawman characters representing either Trumpist politicians, repugnant one-percenters or flagrantly out-of-touch liberal arts college stereotypes that proliferate post-Trump satires of yore. While these are worthy—and fun—targets of ridicule, such films often showcase the filmmakers’ political leanings without addressing their contributions to (and how they benefit from) the very same class structures their films critique. In contrast, Silva and Firstman depict themselves as the film’s grotesquely unlikeable central characters, uniquely implicating themselves as part of the problem. “We’re really making fun of our people in a way that feels fair,” explained Silva in a recent interview. “Because criticizing republicans or conservative people is like, ‘You already won the battle,’ but we really do suck.”¹

Sebastián and Jordan’s characterization successfully critiques their superficial and apathetic engagement within the contemporary multimedia landscape. Silva’s implementation of The Trouble with Being Born as a framing device (and, rather amusingly, as a beach read) compounds Sebastián’s amoral, flawed character, one whose meaningless quest for inspiration leads him to the direction of a fascist philosopher. Sebastián’s paintings, banal and bordering on self-parody, skewer the wealthy fine arts market’s sometimes confusing priorities. Jordan’s Instagram skits function much the same way, distorting Firstman’s glib creative output and, in Silva’s own words, exemplifying all that is “wrong with the world.”² Both characters are entangled in Mexico City’s gentrification, with Sebastián as a resident and Jordan as an ignorant tourist.

Silva’s hybridization of his and Firstman’s personal lives with the film’s characters, along with Silva and Firstman’s commendably brazen performances, achieves a performance-art–like effect, an experiment in how much humiliation they and the audience can endure in portraying themselves as obnoxiously as possible. Sebastián and Jordan (wealthy, white and just as famous on screen as they are in real life) are openly shallow and egocentric, regarding their friendship in the symbiotic conditions of gravitas and sex while indulging in unfulfilling hedonism. The pair’s transactional-yet-friendly dynamic appears similar in real life, or at least in their press junkets—the script’s narrative is based on an actual proposition Firstman made to Silva at a beach, and each hints at holding the other in a paradoxical mixture of admiration and contempt. Thus, Rotting in the Sun is both unwatchable yet impossible to turn away from, a perfectly curated exercise in alienation.

Social satire is nothing new for Silva, whose 2013 film Crystal Fairy and the Magical Cactus also took a stab at vapid millennials. In fact, Rotting in the Sun echoes many thematic elements of Silva’s other films, including The Maid’s class commentary, Crystal Fairy’s use of pop-philosophy, and the presence of gentrification throughout Nasty Baby (2015, also starring Silva). The film even freshly interpolates the harrowing climax of Silva’s directorial debut Life Kills Me (2007), which Jordan acknowledges. While these references may be lost on newcomers, those familiar with Silva’s works will read them as the director’s ruminations on his filmography and creative longevity, potentially questioning whether his work stands the test of time, or perhaps celebrating his films’ prescience (although Rotting in the Sun shares Triangle of Sadness’s indulgence in over-the-top gross-out humor and abrupt tonal shifts, Nasty Baby shares these traits and predates both projects).

Rotting in the Sun’s acerbic dialogue and delightfully deranged twists elevate the film from some of the derivative class-conscious commentary trappings that slow its momentum. Silva effectively diverges from the homogenized post–Knives Out modality of satire by examining his own role in an increasingly divisive, vacuous, absurdist, and ominous sociopolitical climate, while also offering a timely depiction of pandemic-era nihilism and emotional atrophy.