Review: ‘The Sun Never Sets’ shines with an authentic acting showcase
2026 / Dir. Joe Swanberg / 2026 Chicago Critics Film Festival
Rating: 4/5
Watch if you like: Drinking Buddies, Challengers, remembering that Jake Johnson is hilarious and should really get more big roles, thinking “Damn, Alaska looks really beautiful and I should go there before the glaciers melt.”
Dakota Fanning stars as Wendy, an Anchorage woman caught between two polar opposite love interests in Joe Swanberg’s long-awaited return to directing. She’s been in a stable and comfortable relationship with Jack (Jake Johnson), an older divorcee with two kids who’s content with life but worries Wendy will one day grow to resent him and leave if she doesn’t give herself the opportunity to explore what else is out there. He encourages her to spend the summer dating again, which he promptly regrets when she rekindles a relationship with Chuck (Corey Michael Smith, Gotham, Saturday Night), a more adventurous dude bro who’s exciting but unreliable, to say the least.
Swanberg takes a very Hollywood romantic-comedy premise and turns it into a more mature version of the intimate, improvisational style he launched with early mumblecore films like Hannah Takes the Stairs and later gained broader name recognition with Drinking Buddies and the Netflix series Easy. Largely thanks to a never-better Jake Johnson, The Sun Never Sets is frequently hilarious but natural-feeling, with each character having their own set of charms and flaws that the film never fully condemns. Fanning is the glue of the whole thing, giving perhaps the best showcase of her acting abilities in her adult career as a more “masculine-coded” woman unable to fully express herself and stand up for her own dreams.
As a fellow Chicagoan who’s long held Swanberg in a place of high regard and literally sees him around town all the time, I found The Sun Never Sets not just a welcome return for the indie film director but one of his most accomplished works to date. There’s more attention paid than ever to the craft of filmmaking, thanks to reteaming with much of his crew from Easy, and he’s brought together the right people and given them the space to bring authenticity to their characters. Let’s hope that now that he’s back at it, he’s here to stay.