A hurricane is coming and Atlantic Beach, Florida is directly in its path. The tourists have already left. Most residents remain. Why? Because this is hurricane country. None of this is new. Maybe the storm will hit. Maybe it won’t. Is that chance worth the time and effort of skipping town? Or is the excitement of experiencing it as it washes over you too good to pass up? And what about those who simply can’t be bothered either due to age or complacency? This is home, after all. For some, this is all they’ve ever known.
Alexandra Simpson’s No Sleep Till plays out in a slice-of-life documentarian style. It’s a quiet piece with gorgeous images (kudos to cinematographer Sylvain Froidevaux) and interesting characters engaged in the seemingly wild juxtapositions inherent to maintaining a mundane status quo through the uncertainty of impending chaos. There’s a storm-chaser (Taylor Benton) recording videos from his truck who’s constantly asked and invited in by locals to share a meal or sleep in a bed. A teen (Brynne Hofbauer) working and socializing like nothing is out of the ordinary because this is merely life in Florida. And two best friends (Xavier Brown-Sanders and Jordan Coley) deciding to leverage the mandatory evacuation as an excuse to get away.
We move back and forth between them as other minor characters sometimes overlap to add some extra everyman flavor. There’s the suddenly empty tourist shop Hofbauer works at. A local skate park frequented by her and Brown-Sanders as spectators. We get a glimpse into Coley’s stand-up routine and get excited about his desire to hit Philly and see if his set will shine in the big city. A father-daughter duo clean pools for now-abandoned homes, Benton relives past storms via saved videos on his phone, and all the while radio and tv broadcasts talk about the hurricane’s path and the potential damage to come.
I can’t say I ever felt a sense of danger, though. Whether intentional or a byproduct of the calmness exuded by these characters, you really do believe nothing is amiss. I lived in Florida for five years and remember the allure of hurricane season, the anticipation of living through a storm that never came (we moved two years before Hurricane Andrew). Would we have changed our tune if an evacuation order occurred? Probably. Although one can’t begrudge those who don’t. You must only look at the old gentleman who invites Benton in for ham and grits: he can barely walk with his cane, but that lack of mobility becomes more reason to stay. It would be too much wasted energy to leave every time the warnings came and went without cause.
That lack of stakes also arrives from there being no real plot beyond a communal indifference to Mother Nature’s wrath. This is a product of what Simpson calls a “common intention of atmosphere over narrative” on behalf of the Omnes Films collective. She and the others working under that umbrella seek to portray the existential over the literal. No Sleep Till could have easily focused on one or more of these characters in more direct ways with convenient intersections and heightened drama, but that wouldn’t capture the unlikely serenity she puts onscreen instead. It would lose the complexity of today’s numbness towards tragedy.
Because not everything is life or death––not even situations alarmists would label as such. Sometimes what we believe to be harrowing is revealed as an excuse to party instead. Sometimes we embrace the potential of destruction to drag ourselves out of our everyday malaise and pursue more. So when the climactic moment of disaster doesn’t come and our jolt of adrenaline subsides (this isn’t Twisters), those who haven’t already acted on it might end up opening their eyes to realize it’s just another Tuesday. Motivation must wait until next time.
No Sleep Till premiered at the Venice Film Festival.