‘No Sleep Till’ Review: A Tropical Storm Threatens a Florida Town in a Mesmerizing Debut

Alexandra Simpson’s debut No Sleep Till opens with a haunting message. Over the airwaves in Florida, a crackly voice announces a tropical storm warning for the area. The tone is stern but matter-of-fact, a sign of the routine nature of these events. As the voice rattles off forecast advisory numbers — essentially encouraging residents to evacuate — we see scenes of people going about daily life. Pool laps must be completed, wet hair blow dried and dogs fed.

Elsewhere in Jacksonville, where Simpson sets her film, people are readying themselves to party, as if the only appropriate response to an atmosphere of doom is with one last rave. They light sparklers and play music loudly while moving their bodies. Working with Swiss cinematographer Sylvain Marco Froidevaux, Simpson captures these groups like ghostly figures haunting an apocalyptic world. 

Bowing in select theaters this Friday, No Sleep Till follows a handful of residents as the hurricane threatens their area. The film, which premiered at Venice last year and is being released by Factory 25, is composed of vignettes that thematically build upon one another to conjure the distinctive lyricism of coastal ennui and the increasingly familiar dread of climate fatalism. On that latter point, No Sleep Till joins a small but growing number of films that continue to push representations of climate change by quietly threading the realities of the crisis within the narrative. No Sleep Till does a particularly fine job of portraying an eerie kind of climate adaptation, one in which people acquiesce to their fate in the face of the elements. That’s especially true of the families for whom the idea of evacuating doesn’t seem to cross their mind. 

Similarly to her contemporaries, Simpson, who directed, wrote and edited No Sleep Till, tells a nonlinear story with poetic undertones. The film is the latest from a collective known as Omnes Film, whose previous offerings include Tyler Taormina’s Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point and Carson Lund’s Eephus. Like these other projects, No Sleep Till finds new ways — mostly through experimenting with atmosphere — into a familiar story. The film moves at the languorous speed of a humid summer day. As we amble from one scene to the next, we overhear bits of conversation and piece together stories of entire lifetimes. This pacing gives the film a fever-dream quality that’s hard to shake. One moment we are watching figures gesticulating against the deep purple sky of a transitioning day; the next, we see pool cleaners methodically at work. All the while, the low buzzing sounds of the natural world envelop us. 

While there is no conventional narrative, No Sleep Till eventually converges around three stories. In one, a storm chaser (played by Taylor Benton, who chases tornadoes and cyclones in real life) tries to get closer to the approaching tropical cyclone. As residents drive away from the town, he goes toward it, stopping along the way to have brief and sometimes revelatory conversations with locals.

In another storyline, a young woman named June (Brynne Hofbauer), whom we initially meet while she’s swimming at the pool, carries on her routines in what begins to feel more and more like a ghost town. There’s a scene in which June gets a note from a friend. He wishes her well, and the goodbye — written on a scrap of paper — reflects another tragic reality of these increasingly volatile weather patterns: the separation of friends and sometimes even family.

The last story, my favorite, follows comedian Will (Jordan Coley) and his friend Mike (Xavier Brown-Sanders) as they negotiate a trip up north as a way to escape the incoming storm and perhaps even achieve their ambitions of comic fame. Their story bucks climate nihilism by subtly celebrating friendship and dreaming even in the face of disaster. Their relationship operates at a natural, low-key frequency, and their conversations — Mike wants to stay, Will thinks they should go — are sweet and occasionally sad. On the road, they talk about fine-tuning their acts as well as cities they should stop in before they reach their final destination in Philadelphia. Their talks culminate in a particularly poignant exchange about risks and, in Mike’s words, the excitement of  “doing something.” 

Even as the storm rages on, waxing and waning as it approaches the shore, the people in this town continue to do something. That feels like the grandest lesson of Simpson’s modest but assured film.