B'Twixt Now and Sunrise

Scott Hardie: “It ruled.”

Wow, this movie really took a long, weird journey to its eventual release, and I say that after recently seeing the similarly long-in-gestation 5-25-77. Apparently back in the 2000s, Francis Ford Coppola spent several years trying to engineer a movie that he could "conduct like an orchestra." If I understand correctly, the plan was for the film to be shot digitally with different takes and tones for each scene, and then for Coppola to attend each screening personally, sitting in the projector room with a laptop and choosing on the fly which takes to use, by trying to read the mood of the audience and the partial film as it progressed. He produced the footage with actors like a pre-cancer Val Kilmer and pre-adulthood Elle Fanning, but couldn't figure out the technology to make live real-time editing work. At some point, he gave up and cobbled together a single edit of what turned out to be quite a messy film that he screened at film festivals as Twixt in 2011. It was panned by critics, which may explain why it never got released in the United States and only barely played in theaters overseas. Coppola eventually re-edited the footage into a more coherent and polished and shorter film, which played at the Alamo Drafthouse in 2022 as B'Twixt Now and Sunrise, and finally got released on disc & streaming services in America in 2023. I guess by the standards of Thorough Movie Reviews, that makes it a 2023 release, but it sounds like a miracle that the film exists at all, let alone that it's damn good. (Your mileage may vary: Audience reaction on IMDb to both versions remains highly polarized, as I'll explain below.) I didn't know any of the film's convoluted backstory when I watched it; I just thought it had an intriguing if tin-earred trailer and jumped in.

This is a movie inspired by an intense dream that Coppola had about Edgar Allan Poe and Gothic romance that he eventually realized was a manifestation of his guilt and grief over the death of his son years earlier. And it's a movie about dreams, as the main character experiences several meandering, surreal, David Lynchian dreams that take up nearly half of the running time of the film. But the sense of unreality extends to the waking scenes too, perhaps owing to the varied tones of the original footage; it's sometimes stilted, sometimes silly, and never predictable from moment to moment. Although the dialogue is flat and unimaginative, which is a shame given that the main character is a novelist and poetry collector who ought to be able to turn phrases much better than this, the ever-shifting and mysterious mood of the film more than makes up for it. I was captivated by both the waking scenes and dream scenes, strikingly photographed by cinematographer Mihai Malaimare Jr. and rich with tiny details that reinforce the story in subtle ways, although the cheap digital photography does the imagery no favors, robbing the film of depth of field.

I can't lie: Your ability to enjoy this depends on your tolerance for an unfinished story and plot threads that go nowhere. Much like the dream that inspired Coppola until something interrupted his sleep before it ended, the film itself just suddenly ends without a proper third act, resolved emotionally but not narratively, re-working parts of Twixt's original ending into its dream scenes. And there are plenty of plot details that never get a follow up, from a silent old woman who shares an important family name, to the unexplained environmental conditions inside a belfry. You can ponder whether certain waking scenes are in fact dreams themselves, which would explain a lot (how did the main character get knocked unconscious in an accident and then wake up in his bed in a hotel?), but the film refuses to explain itself. I went with the flow and enjoyed the film immensely on an emotional and psychological level rather than expecting it to make sense, but plenty of people will find the experience unsatisfying.

You also should adjust your expectations about genre. It's a horror film by subject matter but not by tone, being too melancholy and mesmerizing to develop any tension, and it lacks almost anything resembling a jump scare. But it's also not a comedy, which is how YouTube bizarrely classifies it.This review contains spoilers. Reveal it.

− August 3, 2023 • more by Scott • log in or create an account to reply