Rot­ting in the Sun review – bold and bril­liant influ­encer satire

It’s been too long since the Chilean film­mak­er Sebastián Sil­va has been in our midst, and he returns with a palm-sweat­ing satir­i­cal com­e­dy in which the most heinous, grotesque social media celebri­ty you could ever imag­ine (gay YouTu­ber and short film­mak­er Jor­dan First­man, play­ing a self-mock­ing ver­sion of him­self) is not only sal­vaged, but pos­i­tive­ly deified.

Despite its suc­ces­sion of pitch-black plot machi­na­tions cov­er­ing artis­tic rot, moral rot, civic rot and famil­ial rot, Sil­va ends on a moment of tran­scen­dent hope, sug­gest­ing that even the most self-involved per­son in the world can, with ample strug­gle, have their head prized from between their ass cheeks.

Sli­va plays a film­mak­er who takes his anger out on his mutt and his clean­er Vero (Catali­na Saave­dra, star of the director’s more slick 2007 break­through, The Maid). A chance meet­ing with First­man while hes­i­tant­ly cruis­ing on a gay beach retreat sees him rail­road­ed into col­lab­o­rat­ing with this wild­ly irri­tat­ing and self-con­fi­dent media node.

And when HBO turns down all his A‑material, he’s forced to roll out the First­man project which… they love. And at that point the film takes a mad and bril­liant turn, shift­ing away from Sil­va and towards First­man as he is forced to deal with a dark sit­u­a­tion in his own inim­itable, slight­ly clue­less, but even­tu­al­ly admirably dogged way. It’s a film which sets up a lot of easy tar­gets, but shifts its aim at the last sec­ond to take on – and bulls­eye – a whole lot of hard ones.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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