NO SLEEP TILL: The Cone of Uncertainty

There’s nothing quite like the hours leading up to a hurricane. The air changes, everything gets heavy and electric; on the coast, it feels like the ocean is holding its breath, drawing inward, ready to howl. No Sleep Till, Alexandra Simpson’s debut feature, is a moody tone poem to that singularly paradoxical sense of anticipation and malaise that sends house cats into hiding and sets oldtimer’s bones to ache. Observational and lovely to look at, the film (a product of Omnes Films, the collective whose work includes Christmas Eve at Miller’s Point and Eephus) tracks a handful characters through the lead-up to a storm that may well tear their Florida town asunder, or maybe just pass them right by. Loose, poetic, and scruffy as a diary entry in a teenager’s notebook, this low-fi, slow-cinema cross between the meditative curiosity of Hale County This Morning, This Evening and the weary adolescent desperation of The Wolf Knife (with postcard-perfect cinematography to match both) evocatively captures a very particular feeling with ease, though its narrative occasionally gets caught up in the bumpiness of the low pressure system Simpson is creating. 

“You out here watching the sky like I am?” a stormchaser (Taylor Benton) asks his viewers through a blur of pixels. This question is the connective thread that unites the group of strangers Simpson’s camera drifts alongside: An amateur comedian (Jordan Cooley) deciding whether to take off for a fresh start in Philly, a teenage girl working a tchotchke shop (Brynne Hofbauer) pining for an elusive skater boy, a country singer caught in the storm’s path sharing a motel room with a stranger, each one refusing to heed a storm evacuation order. Almost every interaction and exchange is mesmeric, the oscillations between stories hazy, like playing with a radio dial. Watching palm trees beautifully illuminated by distant lightning and set to wander through what Simpson has compared to Chantal Akerman’s Tout une nuit, I found myself mentally flipping through flashes of other Florida media, from the essays of Sarah Gerard to Harmony Korine’s Lotus Community Workshop. But ultimately this isn’t Korine’s or even Sean Baker’s Florida, hewing closer to the tone of a Karen Russell coming-of-age short story (though Simpson herself cites Raymond Carver).

Inspired by the writer-director’s experience growing up half in Florida and half in Paris, there’s something of a distance– what the director has called a “European gaze”–– applied to these characters whose interiorities are painted more through the nostalgic pastel-and-neon landscapes they inhabit than through the stories they ostensibly live everyday. It’s something of a disappointment, then, when in the film’s third act the director works to round out her subjects’ narratives in arcs that, relative to the film’s style and ambitions, feel too neat by a coastal mile. In this kind of story, predicated on the fickleness of storm patterns and minute changes in the wind, it should go without saying that the journey is what compels, the destination virtually beside the point. Even the imagery eventually becomes too literal (a raucous high school hurricane party is silhouetted in an apartment window as the storm approaches, a car makes a U-turn, etc.) and meanings become too clear.

Still, the staticky marriage of anticipation and moribund malaise Simpson manages to conjure so gently for most of the runtime–– narrative by way of the Coriolis effect–– is hypnotic throughout, particularly for a first feature. “It’s pretty remarkable actually,” one stormchaser observes to another, “the sky, the atmosphere, it’s a constant attempt at balance.” No Sleep Till lets us feel that balance wobble, and it’s a pleasure to spend some time in that in-between-state, that brief point of pure, ambiguous potential that meteorologists call the cone of uncertainty.   

No Sleep Till is currently streaming.