Critics reviews

Sun Don't Shine is itself a battle between the raw and the cooked, as these two wunderkinder, along with fellow multi-hyphenate Kentucker Audley, contend with casting a tried-and-true thin-thread lovers-on-the-run plot into the realm of pure character study.

Sun Don't Shine serves up a stiff cocktail of suspense and dread in a remarkably lean and economical fashion... [The film] suggests a contemporary American indie cinema haunted by the ghosts of the New Hollywood just as that movement took its cues from mid-century European art cinema, and it will be fascinating to see how (and whether) filmmakers like Seimetz continue to explore this lineage.

Sun Don't Shine," a dreamily compelling lovers-on-the-lam movie, unspools like a Françoise Sagan novel: purposefully, enigmatically and with a raw emotional purity that makes its volatile central couple appear even more defenseless than they really are.

Seimetz's film has a bit of the flavor of O'Connor's Southern-gothic story [A Good Man is Hard to Find] while also harking back to shoestring filmmaking of an earlier era (Malick'sBadlands, Barbara Loden's Wanda) in its throttling tragedy of circumstance. But the psychological underpinnings don't feel the least bit derivative—Audley and the haunted-looking Sheil convey the queasy desperation of wading through a world both too delicate and too brutal for words.

There's a fine line between slow-burn deliberation and simply being slack, of course, and Seimetz hasn't quite figured out how to sustain long-form tension; by the time this modest microindie noir starts laying its cards on the table, your attention will have already folded.

In keeping with noir tradition, Sun Don't Shine slithers along toward a fatalistic conclusion of double crosses and epic fails set in the deep swamps of the Everglades. Except Seimetz sees such plot beats as secondary to the overall mood of the film. It's not about what these characters are doing or even why, but the forlorn and asphyxiating vibe of their very existence, the way their physical appearance reflects the film's overarching theme of emotional and physical panic.

Stubbornly shot in super-16 rather than the ubiquitous DV, it is also imbued with a certain classicism – the almost magical tropes of a genre drenched in an archaic sense of tragedy. So the card played by the mise en scène goes beyond pure realism and spins a tale of amour fou between two contemporary losers, Crystal and Leo.

In this wondrously accomplished and furiously expressive drama blending the moody rambles of a road movie with the tightly ratcheted criminal tension of a film noir the director Amy Seimetz, in her first feature, captures the wildly flailing energy and exhausted torpor of grinding frustration as well as the flickering grace of stifled dreams.