Alexandra Simpson’s debut feature, No Sleep Till, is hardly a typical disaster movie. There’s no panicked fleeing, no looting, no screaming and crying. Her approach to depicting the apocalypse, the meteorological kind we’re so used to by now, exacerbated by the untamable will of man, is to immerse us in the eerie stillness of its prelude. Her characters may be separated by their own story threads, but their siloed experiences belie a curious, subconscious tether; it compels them to linger where perhaps they shouldn’t, to return even after committing to leave.
No Sleep Till drops the viewer gently into the mundanity of life in small-town Florida — Atlantic Beach, to be exact. June (Brynne Hofbauer), a teenager with a part-time job at a beach-side souvenir shack, spends her evenings floating in the leaf-strewn calm of the community pool, while the staff whisper to each other in French, and other swimmers get in workouts of varying intensity. At a local dive bar, stand-up comedian Will (Jordan Coley) and his reluctant partner Mike (Xavier Brown-Sanders) put on a show of comedy and sly, though corny, deception, if not to blow their disinterested audience away than to at least keep themselves entertained.
Elsewhere, storm-chaser Taylor (Taylor Benton) stalks the periphery of the coming disaster. His loneliness is more pronounced than the others, more tragic in its literalness; when he speaks over the radio or records himself on his phone, he seems to suggest a life lived on the anxious edges of stability, though any ambiguity over his living situation is clarified when a stranger sees inside his truck and offers him a place to sleep.
June, Taylor, and Will and Mike might know each other, and they might not. For the purposes of Simpson’s project, their physical separation is all the more illustrative of their psychological connection. In this way, No Sleep Till feels indebted to a filmmaker like Tsai Ming-liang. Both he and Simpson have an intimate handle on the clandestine nature of loneliness, the kind you don’t speak of, don’t show, or merely can’t express. In Tsai’s Vive L’Amour, for example, three characters occupy an empty apartment unit, their lives separate from each other, never to cross unless in the most (comically) dire of circumstances. In No Sleep Till, suburban malaise takes the place of its urban sibling, and the skeletons of McMansions replace empty, high-rise apartments; but the aching desire to be a part of something is the same.
Where No Sleep Till eschews the traditional markers of narrative storytelling, it makes up for in real-life, communal charm. Simpson sourced her loose stories, and the quietly complex characters at their centers, from the same town in Florida in which the film was made and set, a town once home to her father and that she herself spent most of her life visiting on family trips from Paris. The result is a completely unconventional viewing experience, imbued with a synthesis of familiar reality and alien fantasy; at times as slow and inexplicable as a gallery installation, but never detached from genuine sentiment. There’s as much going on in Will and Mike’s relationship as any other great film about male friendship; Simpson just asks the viewer to search a little deeper for its signals. Same, too, for June and Taylor, who are more solitary than Will and Mike, but no less charged with the everyday concerns and feelings that proves one is alive. June’s skatepark crush makes a video of his best (and worst) tricks, her face a blank slate that effortlessly projects our own feelings as we watch it with her. Taylor, the tragic loner, conveys life’s hardships in the tilt of his head, the dart of his eyes, and a few bites of ham and grits given by a stranger.
Simpson’s film was produced as a part of Omnes Films, a collective of filmmakers currently setting the example for truly independent cinema, particularly as it pertains to America. Those familiar with Omnes Films’ work will notice an intimate kinship between No Sleep Till and the films of Tyler Taormina, one of its members. Broadly, all his films are about nostalgic specters, and the wavering strength of community bonds — be they middle school friends, anonymous suburban neighbors, or intimate family relations. But they’re also about gesture, contained feeling, and our innate desire to search, be that within or outside of oneself. No Sleep Till arrives at roughly the same time as an onslaught of new Omnes Films productions, including Taormina’s Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point, Carson Lund’s Eephus, and Lorena Alvarado’s Venezuelan-set Lost Chapters. As the independent film industry seems prepared for its own impending disaster, No Sleep Till is an instructive guide in how we might respond.
Published as part of New Directors/New Films 2025.
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