Gregory Nussen is Screen Rant’s senior film critic. They have previously written for Deadline Hollywood, Slant Magazine, Backstage and Salon. Other bylines: In Review Online, Vague Visages, Bright Lights Film Journal, The Servant, The Harbor Journal, Boing Boing Knock-LA and IfNotNow’s Medium. They received the 2022 New York Film Critics Circle Graduate Prize in Criticism and are proud members of GALECA, the Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics. They co-host the Great British Baking Podcast. Gregory also has a strong performing career: his most recent solo performance, QFWFQhas been nominated for five awards, winning Best Solo Theater at the Hollywood Fringe Festival in 2025.
Among the filmmakers from the mumblecore movement of the early 2000s, it is Joe Swanberg whose work still retains the very essence. Despite growing budgets and more recognizable actors, his work from the late 2010s is defined by a devotion to naturalism and the intricacies of coupling, much of which he made indelible through largely improvised scripts and a refined understanding of how a montage tells the story. In the nine years since his last feature film (Win it all), Swanberg’s keen sense of authenticity has only grown stronger, like a painter perfecting his brushstroke.
The sun never sets finds Swanberg playing with a much larger budget than he usually works with. Filmed in and around the snowy valleys of Anchorage, Alaska, the film exudes a sense of awe-inspiring wonder. Panoramic aerial shots of white-capped mountains and rippling lakes stitch together scenes of incisive honesty; there is an inherent and decidedly beautiful contrast between these person-to-person encounters. The uncertainty of adult life seems unnatural in the face of the heavy certainty of the landscape.
The Sun Never Set’s nuanced drama is fueled by career-best Dakota Fanning
The film’s plot works on a scale as small as Drinking BuddiesSwanberg’s 2013 menage-a-quart, except here he focuses his attention on Wendy (Dakota Fanning), a construction site manager in her thirties, whose good-natured devotion to “living in the moment” perhaps prevents her from understanding her own difficulties. Perhaps she fears that if she zooms out, she will have to admit her own frustrations with life. Or perhaps she is naturally careful not to project herself too far into the future, for fear of missing out on the present.
Anyway, it’s about her older boyfriend, Jack (Jake Johnson), which more or less forces her to take stock of what she really wants in life. A single father of two, the wealth manager volunteers as the school’s basketball coach. The couple is well established and loving, Wendy has a strong bond with the children and they all get along very well with Jack’s ex-wife (Anna Konkle). Everything is fine.
But privately, Wendy accumulates a mountain of frustration and confusion. The mere mention of her friend’s (Karley Sciortino) pregnancy causes her to lock herself in her car and scream. She wants children and marriage; Jack has been there before and won’t do it again either. And, apparently concerned about his girlfriend’s future happiness, he suggests something drastic: They break up for six months, Wendy takes time to date others, and they both wonder if this is the long-term life they want to live.
Wendy hates the idea of running roombut it doesn’t seem like she really has a choice and so she tries college. On her second or third date, she meets her ex-boyfriend, Chuck (Cory Michael Smith), who returned to Anchorage to work as a tourist pilot. The reunion is immediately filled with unresolved sexual and emotional tension. In these and other ways, Swanberg interrupts an otherwise grounded reality with little moments of magic, in much the same way that real life works.
It’s Chuck’s reappearance that makes Jack realize he may have made a mistake in a moment of misguided altruism, and suddenly Wendy finds herself inadvertently thrust into an experiment in polyamory. Not content to leave Jack behind for now, and not really sure if Chuck has changed enough since their breakup, she is caught between two very different worlds. While young Chuck experiences a desire for marriage, children, and a life outside, his financial insecurity causes them both to rush headlong into a shared living situation that neither of them seems particularly ready for. And while Jack’s cash flow and wonderful children make him all the more desirable, he is functionally stubborn and controlling.
Appreciately, The sun never sets features deeply complex characters, avoiding an easy 1:1 comparison between two wildly different partners. But it’s not as simple as one person providing one thing while another provides something else. Life, relationships, and sex are all much more nuanced than shopping lists, as is Wendy’s understanding of what she needs versus what she thinks she should look for.
Of course, given that Swanberg works through heavy improvisation, much of the credit goes to Fanning and Johnson, with the latter considering this his fourth collaboration. This may be Fanning’s best performance to date, a complex characterization of someone who is as filled with determination and dignity as she is with indecision. As Wendy, Fanning has a special way of presenting someone who can be both open and closed in equal measure: smiling in difficulties, energetic and upright when angry, light and airy when experiencing joy.
Eventually, The sun never sets is her film, and she’s such a fun actress to watch that everything else comes together (even if it’s frankly a little hard to buy into the idea that she’s a construction worker). Swanberg, who wrote, directed and edited the film, as usual, gives us a portrait of rare tenderness of an intersection that we must all face at least once. The sun that never sets is the one that forces us to continually re-evaluate our own lives. But that’s not a bad thing. It’s warm under its rays.
The sun never sets screened at the 2026 SXSW Film and Television Festival.
- Release date
- March 13, 2026
- Runtime
- 102 minutes
- Director
- Joe Swanberg
- Writers
- Joe Swanberg
- Producers
- Dakota Fanning, Jake Johnson, Cory Michael SmithJoe Swanberg
