Joe Swanberg's The Sun Never Sets is built on a gift that is also a trap. Jack (Jake Johnson), a divorced financial advisor in his mid-forties, tells his girlfriend of two years, Wendy (Dakota Fanning), that they should take a break so she can date other people and be sure of him before she commits. He frames it as generosity. The film knows better. Swanberg's first feature in over half a decade treats the break as the real breakup, an act of control wearing the costume of selflessness, and spends its 102 minutes watching three adults pay for it.
Fanning carries the film without ever reaching for it. Wendy is a construction manager in Anchorage who has watched her friends marry and reproduce, and Fanning plays her ambivalence as something physical: a stalled posture, a look that keeps landing a half-second late. She lets Wendy be unsure without making her weak. Johnson, Swanberg's collaborator across a decade of films, does the harder trick of staying likable while the character curdles. His Jack talks himself into calm on video calls with a friend (Lamorne Morris), then unravels the moment Wendy's ex, Chuck (Cory Michael Smith), reappears. Smith plays Chuck almost entirely in pauses. When Wendy asks if she can call him, the silence before his answer does the work a page of dialogue would.
The craft argument here is light. Cinematographer Eon Mora shoots Anchorage on 35mm, and the format matters: grain, mountains, and a summer sun that refuses to go down give the film a scale most relationship dramedies never attempt. Swanberg has said the title exists to keep audiences from reading the bright exteriors after a night scene as continuity errors. That is true, and it undersells what Mora does with the permanent dusk. Bar interiors, kitchens, and parking lots backed by snowfields all sit under the same flat, exposing light. Nobody in this film gets the cover of darkness. The soundtrack, a run of unremarkable pop songs, is the one place where the production sounds like it was assembled for a streaming queue rather than a theater.
What the film understands is that permission is a form of possession. Jack hands Wendy her freedom and then wants credit for the gesture, then wants the freedom back, then offers to reverse his position on having more children if that is what it takes. Swanberg refuses to let any of this read as romance. The improvised method, with the leads credited as producers and working from an outline, produces conversations that go on a beat too long, which is the point; people who are lying to themselves need the extra sentence. The film also refuses the two easy exits. There is no comic competition between suitors, and there is no enlightened arrangement where everyone shares. Wendy ends up somewhere more uncomfortable than either.
The weakness is Chuck. He is written as Jack's inversion in every column: renter against homeowner, bush pilot against desk, camping trip against designer kitchen. The symmetry is too clean for a film that otherwise distrusts clean shapes, and Smith's restraint can only fill in so much. The Alaskan daylight, too, stays texture rather than argument; the film acknowledges it and moves on. These are real limits. They also leave the central pairing, Fanning and Johnson negotiating a relationship neither will name, with more room than a tighter script would have allowed.
The Sun Never Sets opened in Chicago before New York or Los Angeles, and IFC has it on hundreds of screens this week, the widest release of Swanberg's career. It earns the footprint by being smaller than it looks. The mountains are enormous. The problem is a man who could not stand to be chosen without first being tested. Generosity is easy to fake. Wanting someone is not.