Even the worst movies always have a shot at critical reassessment. Consider the 1961 "Last Year at Marienbad," a byword for bafflement upon its release, which has since come to be seen as a mesmerizing classic. Then there's Michelangelo Antonioni's "L'Avventura," which was savaged at the Cannes Film Festival that same year. But critics rallied to its defense. Then, five years later, actual ticket-buying customers flocked to the director's 1966 "Blow-Up" — a picture that ended with an eminently mockable tennis match played by mimes — and made it a hit. But "Zabriskie Point," Antonioni's awful 1970 paean to the hippie "revolutionaries" of the moment, was a resounding bomb, and would seem unlikely ever to be reconsidered

There's no predicting these things, of course. People who've thrown away precious chunks of their lives on more recent films like, oh, Charlie Kaufman's "Synecdoche New York" or Nicolas Winding Refn's "The Neon Demon," are probably still ruing the time they wasted on those sorts of pictures.

Now comes "Sundown," an odd little item from Mexican writer-director Michel Franco, a guy who — please be advised — is in no hurry to clarify what's going on in his story, and in fact keeps us hanging on in perplexed contemplation even after the picture has arrived at the end of its 83-minute runtime. This might normally be irritating, but Franco's oblique narrative style establishes a feeling of vague unease, and as the picture proceeds, we can feel it mounting.

Tim Roth is Neil Bennett, a wealthy Englishman on a family vacation in sunny Acapulco, Mexico. We first see him seated on a boat contemplating a clump of freshly caught fish gasping and dying on the deck. The doomed creatures are clearly a symbolic assessment of Neil's state of mind, or soul, maybe. Next, we see him recumbent on a roasting balcony along with a woman we take to be his wife and two teenagers who must be their kids. But wait: the woman, whose name is Alice (Charlotte Gainsbourg), is actually Neil's sister, not his wife; and the kids (Samuel Bottomley and Albertine Kotting McMillan) are hers, not his. And something else is up, we can feel it.

There's a call from London and Alice tells Neil that their mother is dying. Then another call: She's dead. Alice shepherds everybody to the airport for a flight home, but on arrival Neil announces that he's left his passport back at the hotel. But as soon as Alice and the kids are gone, he takes a taxi back to town and checks into another hotel. He hasn't really lost his passport after all. Before long he sets up a new life, lazing on the sand and trudging among the other tourists with a sweet shopgirl named Bernice (Iazua Larios). Alice keeps calling from London to check on Neil's passport situation, but he continues having no progress to report.)

Squibbets of information leak out to us. Neil and Alice are the heirs to a very big international meat-processing company, worth millions. Alice has always run things; Neil will be her heir whenever it might come to that. But Neil says he has no interest in money. In fact, he tells Alice he wants to relinquish his cut of the family business. To facilitate this, a family lawyer (Henry Goodman) is flown in. Arrangements are made, papers signed. Alice gets in a taxi to return to the airport for a flight back to England.

Around this point we learn that many taxi drivers around Acapulco are in the employ of vicious gangsters who specialize in kidnapping and murder. (The city is among the most dangerous in the world.) Suddenly, as we watch, there's an explosion of bloody violence. Somehow, Neil winds up in a grim prison. There, in a shower room, he finds a slaughtered pig. Rather pointedly like the ones that Neil and his family are in the business of having killed from their faraway mansions.

The family lawyer manages to spring Neil from jail. He returns to Bernice, and they recommence their beach life, with Neil sustaining himself on an endless procession of beers. He's not much of a character, with his slumped shoulders and haunted eyes, but Roth, grubby and detached, makes you feel his incapacitating despair, and his awareness of the ways in which he has utterly screwed up his life. It's a very quiet performance in a quiet movie, and it couldn't have been easy to create. Director Franco does a good, modest job on the film. He puts the picture in Roth's hands and, without visibly petitioning for our attention, he ambles away with it.

Kurt Loder is the film critic for Reason Online. To find out more about Kurt Loder and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.