Rotting in the Sun Review: Sebastián Silva’s Excoriating Satire of Gay Performativity

John Waters muse Jean Hill once said that she was well-known for “shaking hands with the dick,” and in Sebastián Silva’s Rotting in the Sun, influencer Jordan Firstman certainly takes the baton. At once an excoriating satire of the performativity of homosexuality within a social media-addled community as well as a seemingly earnest lament for the total loss of collectivity, the film minces neither words nor bodily appendages.

Silva plants tongue deep in cheek as a hopelessly depressed caricature of himself, dodging promotional commitments, slapping his shit-eating dog across the face in full view of horrified passersby, watching people watch him page through E.M. Cioran’s The Trouble with Being Born, and getting lost in a K-hole as often as he can manage. It’s not that Silva’s on-screen alter ego is out of ideas—in fact, he spends much of his time slashing away at his notepad with violent aphorisms and grotesque drawings—but rather that he’s bored with whatever it is everyone else wants him to do and be. “The more you live, the less useful it seems to have lived,” he writes.

Working on his manager’s churlish tip that it’s easy to obtain fatal doses of phenobarbital in Mexico, and lured in by the uncensored Google search results for the gay hotspot Zicatela, Sebastián throws caution (though not his beach trunks) to the wind and heads for the sand. Once there, he promptly almost drowns trying to rescue a man from the same fate.

That man is Jordan Firstman (or, rather, Jordan Firstman playing Jordan Firstman), who instantly ingratiates himself with the guileless abandon of a molly-rolling twink attempting to stretch three a.m. eternal on the dance floor. Claiming that he just watched Silva’s Crystal Fairy & the Magical Cactus the night before and proclaiming their chance encounter as fated by the gay stars, Jordan immediately turns the moment into a pitch. He hard-sells Sebastián on his concept for a series called You Are Me, all the while grabbing random beach nudists’ dicks and conspiratorially warning Sebastián, “Don’t sleep with him. He’s got everything.”

So far, Silva’s only just set up the machinery supporting his take-no-prisoners treatise, and there’s enough self-loathing to risk alienating the bulk of the film’s target audience. That, it turns out, is Silva’s ace in the hole. Any gay man who’s found themselves struggling to not police another gay man’s amplitude of frivolity or, conversely, reached the end of one’s rope dealing with another’s seemingly bottomless capacity to pity himself will recognize the uncomfortable truths behind Silva’s puckish, post-respectability political posturing.

Silva himself has said in interviews that, despite the opening salvo’s brazen chorus line of cock, eroticism is just about the furthest thing from his aim. Indeed, most of the dicks are framed in isolation from their owners’ faces, as they would be on Grindr. All depictions of sex throughout Rotting in the Sun are strictly in media res, as mechanical and compulsory as breathing, and caught within that endlessly addictive byplay between seduction and repulsion.

Firstman is, among other things, a writer (one of his higher-profile credits is the similarly social media-lampooning Search Party). He’s not credited with co-writing the film—that honor goes to Silva and Pedro Peirano—but it’s hard not to presume he adlibbed some of Jordan’s note-perfectly self-involved snipes, as when he posts video of Sebastián doing party drugs and, upon being confronted and told to delete the video, smarms, “What? I was flirting with you!”

Without getting into spoiler territory about what takes Rotting in the Sun into its second act, Silva’s bad faith would be justified even if the film settled for depicting contemporary gay male social mores with a refreshingly liberated eye toward just how annoying, too, gay men find many other gay men. But as the playfulness of Firstman and Silva undercutting rails of ketamine with layers of metatextuality subdues into something considerably darker—and, yes, more far-fetched—their gamesmanship in playing versions of themselves begins to pay off thematically.

Bluntly put, we’re all playing versions of ourselves, and it’s that which becomes Rotting in the Sun’s central thesis, albeit put forth with as much macho crudeness as Silva can muster. And as Jordan finds himself reduced to using a hilariously inadequate iPhone translation device in a vain attempt to pry truly valuable information from those whose language he doesn’t understand, and vice versa, just maybe does it begin to dawn on him that he’s been using his phone to pervert his own intentions to his anonymous audience the entire time.