There’s a point, somewhere around hour three of a sleepless binge on cigarettes and neon, when the city stops being a grid of steel and glass and becomes a writhing organism — teeth in the pavement, eyes in the gutters, a heartbeat under the asphalt. SUN lives in that fever-space, a feral descent through New York’s arteries, pumping black blood and paranoia, dragging a haunted dancer through a nightmare carnival of his own making.

Dominic Lahiff isn’t interested in narrative comfort or traditional story beats; he takes the audience by the throat and hurls them down a staircase of toxic masculinity, one cracked vertebra at a time. The dancer, played with apocalyptic intensity by Cordell “Storm” Purnell, becomes both predator and prey — a man poisoned by love, overprotection, and jealousy until it curdles into possession, body and soul. Watching him stumble through the city’s nocturnal labyrinth is like witnessing a man wrestle not just with ghosts but with the razor-bladed reflection in his own mirror.

And here’s where it goes nuclear: Lahiff choreographs this collapse not with words but with movement. Purnell’s physicality — twitching, spasming, exploding into motion like a man possessed by every violent urge his body has ever contained — becomes the language of descent. Dance as madness. Dance as confession. Dance as exorcism. It’s a performance that slips the leash of acting and lunges straight into the ritualistic.

The themes are sharp and cruel. SUN is a meditation on how men weaponize protection into control, how jealousy gnaws holes in the skull, how love can deform into something ravenous and diseased. Lahiff has no patience for redemption arcs — this is about confronting the rot, peeling back the skin, and finding not salvation but raw meat pulsing in the dark.

Visually, it’s a knockout. Every frame looks soaked in cigarette smoke and concrete sweat, the cinematography catching the city not as backdrop but as living antagonist. And the score — sweet hell, the score — it doesn’t just accompany, it punishes. A pounding, relentless soundtrack that syncs with Purnell’s movements until sound and body blur into one convulsive dirge. It’s like watching a man dance his way into the underworld with the subway screeching along as orchestra.

The Prognosis:

SUN is cinema as possession. A film that doesn’t want to be watched so much as endured, swallowed, vomited back up in chunks of neon and bile. It’s beautiful, it’s punishing, and it leaves you trembling in the realization that sometimes the monsters we fear aren’t lurking in the alleys of New York — they’re standing right behind our own eyes, grinning, waiting for the music to start.

• Saul Muerte

SUN will screen as part of the Dark Nights Film Festival on Sunday 12th October at 3pm at The Ritz