2025 • 100 min
Don't Let The Sun
This movie was screened on
Synopsis
In a near future devastated by a permanent heat that forces human beings to live in shadow and nocturnal conditions, Jonah works for an agency that sells affective simulations: he performs fathers, sons, partners—emotional presences that can be rented to fill the relational void of a society no longer capable of sustaining authentic proximity. When he is assigned to become the surrogate father of the young Nika, something in his emotional apparatus begins to crack. Within this artificially constructed relationship, a more radical question emerges: if every bond is performative, where does acting end and where does the real need to be recognized begin?
Review
4 min read
Reviewed by Beatrice
· 12. May 2026
“Those who have no masks have no face.”
Luigi Pirandello
Luigi Pirandello
With Don’t Let the Sun, director Jacqueline Zünd constructs an intimate, almost silent dystopia in which science fiction does not serve to imagine the future but to render visible the emotional desert of the present. The sun scorching the surface of the world is not merely a climatic threat: it is the physical manifestation of excessive exposure, of a light that consumes every possibility of closeness. Human beings thus survive in an artificial night, protected within aseptic environments, traversed by temporary relationships and sentimental contracts.
The idea of “affective agencies” comes directly from a real practice in Japan, where specialized companies offer rented relatives, partners, or friends to compensate for absences, mourning, and social failure. Yet Zünd avoids any sociological fascination or anthropological curiosity: what interests her is not the eccentricity of the phenomenon, but its ontological meaning. The film interrogates the very nature of contemporary identity, now reduced to function, performance, and marketable simulation.
In this sense, the most evident dialogue is with Yorgos Lanthimos’ Alps, where a group of individuals replaced the dead by performing their gestures and habits in order to alleviate the grief of the living. However, while Lanthimos observes the dispositif with a clinical, icy, almost entomological gaze, Zünd introduces a more fragile and melancholic vibration. In Don’t Let the Sun, the possibility of an authentic emotional fracture still persists. Jonah is not merely a body executing a role: he is an emptied-out individual who slowly discovers how imitation can generate a residual trace of truth.
But perhaps the deepest reference is Sion Sono’s Noriko’s Dinner Table, a film that as early as the early 2000s had intuited how the dissolution of the contemporary family would transform identity into a performable surface. In Sono’s film, characters rent families to replace their real ones, progressively losing themselves in a spiral of roles and doubling. Zünd takes up this intuition but relocates it within a terminal, post-climatic landscape, where it is no longer only the family that has dissolved, but the entire possibility of a stable presence in the world.
Jonah’s face thus becomes the film’s central axis. Levan Gelbakhiani portrays him as a suspended figure, almost hollowed out from within, a man who has learned to survive by erasing himself within the expectations of others. Every gesture appears controlled, every word filtered through an emotional distance that the film renders visually through geometric architectures, concrete surfaces, and spaces consumed by light. The cinematography transforms the city into a metaphysical space, not far from certain Antonionian deserts: places where the problem is no longer communication, but whether anyone still exists to be reached.
There is a certain predictability in the narrative trajectory. From the very first minutes, it is clear that affective simulation will ultimately produce a residue of authentic feeling. The film accompanies this discovery with sensitivity, yet never truly surprises it or pushes it into radical crisis.
And yet, precisely this theoretical incompleteness makes Don’t Let the Sun compelling. It is not a fully resolved film, but an attempt to interrogate a central question of the present: the transformation of emotions into services, identity into performance, closeness into contract. Rather than a completed dystopia, it feels like the melancholic symptom of a world that has already internalized fiction as an ordinary form of existence.
The sun of the title thus becomes something more ambiguous than an environmental catastrophe. It is the total light of the present, one that erases the shadows necessary for intimacy, exposing every relationship to the logic of performance and consumption. To survive, the characters must retreat into night—that is, into the residual space of uncertainty, desire, and vulnerability.
Zünd’s key insight lies in refusing to treat simulation as mere falsification. In the film, fiction produces real effects. Pretending to be a father slowly generates a form of responsibility, just as performing affection eventually leaves concrete emotional traces. Here Don’t Let the Sun surpasses contemporary dystopian cynicism: it suggests that the human being may never fully cease to desire the other, with all the disorientation this entails, even within a system that commodifies every emotion.
“The simulation threatens the difference between the true and the false.”
Jean Baudrillard
Jean Baudrillard
This movie was in the official competition of Locarno Film Festival
