SUNRISE (2024) - Mark Reviews Movies

Sunrise, Lionsgate

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Review by Mark Dujsik | January 18, 2024

A stranger emerges from the forest in the Pacific Northwest with a thirst for blood and an unclear motive. A family grieves a missing father, who might have been murdered by a local crime boss. Then, there's the crime boss himself, who has big plans to do something or other with local businesses, mostly in order to remove any "undesirables" from the area. With all of this in place, a big mystery of Sunrise is whose story this is supposed to be. From there, perhaps, comes an even bigger question emerges: What story is this movie trying to tell in the first place?

That's somewhat clarified by the end of Ronan Blaney's screenplay, if only because it comes down to a final battle between a set of good guys and a really, really bad guy. Considering how many ideas Blaney tosses into the mix of this supernatural tale of revenge and racism, the fact that it all comes down to a generic, anticlimactic standoff in an abandoned warehouse points to how little thought and development go into those ideas beforehand.

The key figure, oddly enough, becomes Reynolds (Guy Pearce), the local crime lord, whose motives and personality are at least apparent from the story's first actual scene. We meet him talking to a local businessman, who happens to be of Asian heritage. The man's ethnic background is the only thing that matters to Reynolds, a racist man who only vaguely hides his hate with public pronouncements that the country's supposed downfall can be attributed to immigrants and others—basically, anyone who isn't a hard-working white man.

Is this the guy Blaney and director Andrew Baird want to give the most prominent voice in their movie? Obviously, Reynolds is the villain here. If the white supremacist beliefs don't give that away, he viciously murders the businessman when he turns down the criminal's offer and supposedly disrespects Reynolds by turning his back on the man. There's surely something to be said about making the antagonist of a story as ugly and worthy of derision as possible, and Blaney gives Pearce a lot of hate-filled rhetoric and violent threats through which to chew, spit, and howl.

There's the other side of the equation, though, and in regards to the protagonists, the screenplay is far shakier and less decisive. In theory, the main hero is that enigmatic man who comes out of the woods, dressed in a trench coat carrying a stern visage that never leaves actor Alex Pettyfer. We'll the call the man Fallon, because that is or, at least, was his name ten years ago. Who or even what the man is now is another question that's left quite vague. It has something to do with a figure of urban legend in the region: a demonic presence known as "the Red Coat," which has fed on animal sacrifices since the age of the country's indigenous peoples.

Fallon shows up at the home of Yan (Crystal Yu), the murdered businessman's widow—although she still hopes her husband is just missing—and a mother of two kids—teenaged Edward (William Gao) and younger Emily (Riley Chung). Assuming the stranger is an intruder and maybe an associate of Reynolds, Edward knocks him unconscious and, after a recovered Fallon asks for it, provides the stranger with chicken blood.

There's a pretty obvious answer to the mysteries of Fallon's past and his present goal. Since that's the only level of characterization provided to this figure of procrastinating vengeance, it might be unfair to reveal the character's nature and his reason for eventually—as in after a long stretch of hanging out with the family and apparently experiencing a lot of flashbacks about how he ended up in the forest a decade ago—going after Reynolds and his gang. Edward, who's bullied by a teenaged henchman of Reynolds for having a crush on the crime boss' daughter, is even less developed, and Yan simply exists to exist as a persistent thorn in Reynolds' side, refusing to leave her home despite his power and his threats to use it.

All of this means the story is a long wait for an inevitable standoff between our bland heroes, despite the supernatural element of one of them, and a villain who receives so many monologues, so much screen time, and a back story of such familial torment that he might as well be the main character here. Sunrise has a clear point to make, and beyond the laborious pacing, that attention to this character at the expense of the others is a massive miscalculation.

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