Catalina Saavedra and Sebastián Silva in Rotting in the Sun (Sundance Institute)

One of the funnier and adventurous comedies of the year so far, Sebastián Silva’s meta-fiction Rotting in the Sun follows a director (a version of Silva played by Silva); his quietly disgruntled housekeeper Vero (Catalina Saavedra, who is also the lead in his 2009 film, The Maid); and an enigmatic comedian/social media influencer, Jordan (a version of Jordan Firstman, played by Jordan Firstman).

Sebastián is in a rut, depressed, and trying to figure out his next project. In the prickly and amusing opening, he is reading passages of E. M. Cioran’s The Trouble with Being Born and contemplating suicide in a sunny Mexico City park as atonal images and music buzz around him—including a girl by the fountain singing The Cranberries’ “Zombie” offkey. Sebastián’s perspective bristles with irony and spiraling pessimism. Dismissive and rude to Vero, he is a moderately successful artist who is not particularly sympathetic.

For a change of pace, he escapes to a gay nude beach in Playa Zicatela, but continues to be feel depressed and lost in metaphysical musings. Among the film’s title’s different insinuations, Sebastián seems to feel at his worst in sunshine. It’s also hard not to think of Tennessee Williams’s doomed Sebastian on a beach in Suddenly, Last Summer, where the play’s theme, in Williams’s words, is about people who “use each other without conscience.”

Silva’s Sebastián meets vacationing American Jordan, and the two end up using each other in varying degrees. (Jordan posts Sebastián snorting ketamine without Sebastián’s approval on his social media to his hundreds of thousands of followers. When the two ultimately decide to collaborate on a Curb Your Enthusiasm–type series, the tony network Sebastián has been pitching to with no avail, suddenly lights up, at the mention of Jordan’s name, aware of his clout). Jordan knows of Silva’s work and admires his films, but he is also the exact opposite of the filmmaker, and is disparaging of Sebastián’s depression. In one of the best scenes, Jordan tells him, “You can’t hurt me because I’m happy. I’m a happy clown.”

Jordan’s kinetic energy, narcissism, and endless airy breeziness is extremely irritating—which makes an excellent foil for Sebastián, but once the story’s perspective shifts in the third act, partially to Jordan’s own, the film is a bit less impactful, though still engaging. (“What is this dark new personality?” one of his flighty friends asks, “It’s unwatchable.”) However, the film also then centers upon Vero’s plight, and Saavedra gives a sterling performance, oscillating between dramatic-gestured melodrama, heavy sobs, and an internal realist grit. She creates a thorny character who makes questionable decisions. Crystalizing the film’s melancholic absurdity, Jordan and Vero communicate with one another through the robotic audio of a translation phone app.

Silva, along with co-writer Pedro Peirano, deliver a winding triptych of narrative threads, with satiric punches. Even though some of the dialogue and visual pastiches could seem absurd, or too broad, they always end up feeling completely plausible—from the hedonistic clubs and beach parties to Sebastián’s groan-inducing pitch meeting over Zoom, to the blithely gentrifying American tourists glimpsed in backgrounds—one, getting a shoe shine, describes Mexico’s capital city as, “So affordable, it’s like if New York and LA had a baby.”

The jagged style of the movie may be one of the reasons why the comedy lands. Shot by Gabriel Díaz Alliende, there is little depth in its images—it has a roaming, blunt, close-up quality, as if filmed handheld on a phone. The effective, choppy editing flits between interactions of characters to their perspectives of scrolling through bits of social media videos. This may reflect the fractured, short attention span of current social media that can feel so antagonistic to feature-length films. Perhaps this is a bit of an elegy for the social importance and clout of directors and their work. Here, with cast and crew, Silva constructs a distressed and knowing symphony.