Review: Sunrise

Holy shit, is Sunrise stupid. Calm down, Film Twitter – I’m not talking about F.W. Murnau’s 1927 silent Oscar winner. I’m talking about this new one. First off, we’ve got a gray-bearded Guy Pearce. looking like the sixty-something owner of a gotdamn general store, as Reynolds, the powerful (and blatantly racist) boss of a Pacific Northwest town. Just what does he traffic in? I have no friggin’ clue, but he has no qualms about offing an Asian farmer (Chike Chan) whose land he wants, so he does just that in the opening minutes.

The farmer’s family, which includes a shotgun-wielding widow (Crystal Yu), a tormented teenage son (William Gao), and a little daughter (Riley Chung) with aspirations of being a doctor, hold their ground when they’re harassed by Reynolds’s goons. The fam gets some surprise protection in the form of Fallon, a sick stranger played by Magic Mike stud Alex Pettyfer. This mysterious man also craves “fresh blood,” which the son gets from chickens around their farm. Is this guy a vampire, the Prince of Darkness, or a pretty-ass white boy who’s been written in to save this minority family? Most likely, it’s all three.

This supernatural thriller from director Andrew Baird (who directed Pearce in the futuristic 2021 detective story Zone 414) and screenwriter Ronan Blaney, both Irishmen, attempts to be all dark and moody. Since it’s set in the Pacific Northwest (but it’s actually northern Ireland!), Baird and cinematographer Ivan Abel make the town look like it’s always on the verge of raining. But it’s mostly a tiresome, ridiculous slog. It’s like these guys saw a Vice report on racism in the Pacific Northwest and decided to make an urban legend horror story about it.

The antagonists are definitely some dumb-ass, pale-skinned sociopaths. Leading the charge is Pearce’s main heavy, whose loathsome acts include giving his dying, equally-sociopathic mom (Olwen Fouere) a cringe-worthy kiss on the lips. We also have a deputy (Kurt Yaeger) who’s both corrupt and inept, and a high-school bully (Forrest Bothwell) who terrorizes the farmer’s son because they both have eyes on the boss’s daughter (Sophie Boldt). 

Of course, Fallon has unfinished business with most of these yokels. Years ago, they killed his woman (of color) and left him tied to a tree so he could be a sacrifice for “The Red Coat,” a forest demon who went from feasting on animals to people. In his quest for vengeance, Fallon puts on a trenchcoat and shuffles around this thing like both the punisher and the punished. For a guy who sucks down chicken blood for most of this thing, Pettyfer gives a bloodless turn.

SInce Pearce is basically playing a piece of shit, he goes balls-out, spewing racist rhetoric and deranged tidbits about himself like a man who’s really looking forward to voting for Trump in November. And this is all before Fallon takes a bite out of him, and he becomes even more batshit-crazy.

You almost wish Sunrise was just as cuckoo as Pearce’s performance, but this backwoods thriller wants to scare you in a solemn, straight-faced manner, which really doesn’t work since this story is so dumb. Baird and Blaney want to hit us with an occult-tinged parable on how real-life evil will always be more damaging and destructive than mythical evil. But even when it predictably descends into homicidal chaos in the third act, Sunrise comes out looking like a banal, buffoonish mess that has its own head up where the sun don’t shine.

D- 

“Sunrise” is in theaters Friday.