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movie, Sunrise

“You know what he feeds on? Fear.”

Generic dialogue and lack of character depth kills the sometimes promising “Sunrise,” which works best when it has a grit that reminds one of the best vampire flicks of all time, “Near Dark,” but that doesn't happen nearly enough. Once again, we’re in a dark corner of the world, a place where hate is allowed to grow, and not all of the monsters are supernatural. The best elements of “Sunrise” play with that latter idea, arguing that racism and violence are more terrifying than bloodsuckers, but the film too often feels like the story of a MAGA monster and the brutality he inflicts on an immigrant family onto which a vampire story was unsuccessfully grafted. It tries to pull at various threads about outsiders being pushed out of a place that used to welcome them, but it’s blunt when it needs to be nuanced and opaque when it could stand to spell a few things out. This is an extremely self-serious dirge of a movie with a sharp performance from Guy Pearce, but no idea what to do with him or the decent ideas it has under its surface.

Pearce is so consistently good in any genre, and he sinks his teeth (get it?) into the role of Reynolds, a character introduced with a string of racial slurs. In his best scene, he gives an impassioned speech about how men used to work the soil and defend the country. Pearce nails a certain kind of miserable villain, a woe-is-me type who blames everyone else for his problems and takes with force anything he thinks some sort of higher power has granted him as a white male. He’s not just racist and violent, he’s kind of pathetic, and Pearce really gets at that aspect of Reynolds, someone who wants to “make America great again” mostly because he knows that the current one has no use for men like him.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWZbj5k0acQ
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/sunrise-movie-review-2024

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