Joe Swanberg's latest romantic comedy arrives as a half-formed experiment that never quite commits to the disruptions it sets up. "The Sun Never Sets" stars Dakota Fanning as Wendy, a woman navigating the complications of a two-year relationship with Jack, played by Jake Johnson, a frequent Swanberg collaborator who brings his familiar hangdog charm to the role of a single father.
The film represents another chapter in Swanberg's long trajectory away from his mumblecore roots, where sexual explicitness and narrative shapelessness once defined his approach. Over the past decade, he has worked to reconcile the genre's conventional satisfactions with a willingness to explore desire and bodies more openly than typical Hollywood rom-coms allow. "The Sun Never Sets" continues this project, yet the execution falters.
The setup promises genuine friction. Jack proposes a separation, ostensibly temporary, and the film charts the fallout. Wendy and Jack navigate their ambiguous status across two years, oscillating between genuine connection and fundamental incompatibility. The premise invites real exploration of how relationships dissolve, how people convince themselves of second chances, how nostalgia masks incompatibility.
Swanberg's approach has evolved considerably from his early days of handycam realism and improvised dialogue. He now works with conventional production values, recognizable actors, and structured three-act arcs. Yet something essential gets lost in the translation. The film's attempts to honor rom-com tropes while inserting more adult complications feel neither committed nor playful enough to justify the middle ground.
Dakota Fanning brings intelligence and restraint to Wendy, suggesting depths the script doesn't fully excavate. Johnson's Jack remains a familiar type: the well-meaning man-child, emotionally unavailable despite performing partnership. Their chemistry exists primarily in memory and muscle memory, which may be Swanberg's point. Two people who loved each other, who perhaps still love each other, simply cannot make it work. That's honest. It's also dramatically inert without clear stakes or revelations.
The film's sexual content, presumably part of what Swanberg hopes distinguishes his work from mainstream rom-coms, neither shocks nor illuminates. It functions as texture rather than text, acknowledging that adult relationships involve physical desire without exploring what that means when desire and emotional connection misalign.
Swanberg's strategy of treating rom-com conventions with respect while expanding their boundaries is conceptually sound. Directors like Miranda July and the Safdie brothers have made this work by finding genuine strangeness in familiar situations or by doubling down on emotional specificity. "The Sun Never Sets" settles into a comfortable middle distance, respecting the genre without revitalizing it, acknowledging adult complexity without dramatic urgency.
The film's greatest weakness lies in its refusal to take a position. Does it endorse their reconciliation as growth or mistake it for sentimentality? The ambiguity reads less as sophistication and more as indecision. Swanberg's impulse to avoid neat resolution has merit, yet here it produces a film that drifts rather than accumulates meaning, where two likable people simply run out the clock on a relationship viewers never feel invested in saving or watching end.