The Sun Never Sets Review: A Love Triangle in the Land of the Midnight Sun

In the first half of his career, as a foundational member of the mumblecore movement, Joe Swanberg was making at least a movie a year – a galloping clip of funny, provocative, scruffy works by and large about people acting like idiots. But the pace got to be too much, burning out fans like myself who got tired of watching twentysomethings do little and talk endlessly about it.

It’s been six years since Swanberg’s last feature film, even longer since his last one distributed in movie theatres. (In the meantime, he’s done notable work on television, including the Netflix anthology series Easy.) It feels good to reconnect. The Sun Never Sets still feels like a Joe Swanberg production – there’s the typical frankness about sex; frequent collaborator Jake Johnson (Drinking Buddies, Digging for Fire); and a plot inspired, per usual, by people acting like idiots, as humans are wont to do. But the energy has mellowed, shedding the try-hard provocation of the early pictures.

Dakota Fanning stars as Wendy, an early 30s Alaskan construction worker in a committed relationship to divorced dad Jack (Jake Johnson). Jack is a decade and a half older than Wendy; he’s done having kids and doesn’t want to get remarried either. Wendy seems onboard – indeed, when she finds out her best friend is pregnant, Wendy comes off as anti-baby to the point of rudeness – but Jack isn’t convinced she knows her own mind. He proposes a summerlong break for her to date around and decide if she’s truly getting what she wants out of their relationship. Wendy, not given much of a choice, agrees to the plan.

Quite obviously, Jack does not anticipate being threatened by any of Wendy’s potential paramours. (“It’s a bunch of goofy guys who smell like salmon. I’m not worried about it,” he confides over Zoom to a friend played by his New Girl co-star Lamorne Morris.) Instead, Wendy reconnects with an old flame, Chuck (Saturday Night’s Cory Michael Smith), who’s younger, hotter, and shares Wendy’s love of the outdoors. The way Johnson communicates Jack’s dawning realization that he has badly miscalculated the situation had me chortling. It’s the same split second of knowing doom on Wile E. Coyote’s face right after he realizes he’s chased Road Runner off the ledge of a cliff and right before he plummets to hard earth below.

A naturally comic actor, Johnson is best at rooting out the human comedy in this tragic trio of lovers – tragic in that none of them can get out of their own way. But Fanning is the main attraction. She’s not a revelation, per se; we all remember the eerily poised child savant of I Am Sam and War of the Worlds. As an adult, she hasn’t gotten nearly enough leading parts, and it’s a pleasure watching her command a film’s full focus. If the part reads somewhat underwritten, Fanning fills it out with delicacy and nuance, communicating the chaotic but relatable contradictions in someone whose head and heart are not working in concert. And if the plotting sometimes feels a little repetitive, that too feels true to the same drain-circling arguments couples can get trapped in.

With a major movie studio’s backing, or in a different era of moviemaking, you can imagine a glossier approach to The Sun Never Sets – one with bigger stars and a more programmatic script, without the off-brand soundtrack. But I liked this shaggy version very much. It’s never glib; it’s undergirded with compassion. There are some beautifully observed moments capturing how divorced co-parents dance between familiar intimacy and hard-fought boundaries, and how epiphanies don’t come on like a starburst; they’re more about the needle moving a few clicks in the necessary direction. Just as unshowily, Swanberg reminds fans he still has fresh ideas to share.

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This article appears in September 4 • 2026.