Oak Cliff Review: “No Sleep Till”
Written by: Billy Ray Brewton | July 3rd, 2025
[New Film Festival Today writer Billy Ray Brewton continues his coverage of the 2025 Oak Cliff Festival.]
No Sleep Till (Alexandra Simpson, 2024) 2½ out of 5 stars
Over the past several years, writer/director/producer Tyler Taormina has essentially been creating a new kind of cinema, sprung from the legacy of mumblecore, but far more interested in the ways characters connect with their surroundings than the mundane conversations people have with each other. Why? Because it’s far more interesting.
As a director, he’s given us the underseen 2019 Ham on Rye; the flawed-but-beautiful Happer’s Comet, from 2022; and his breakout feature, 2024’s Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point. He also produced this year’s low-key masterpiece, Eephus, which has received near universal acclaim. His films, whatever his connection to them, all feel of a piece. Taormina knows what he likes as a filmmaker, and has attached himself to others with like-minded sensibilities.
No Sleep Till, his most recent effort as a producer, falls right in line with everything else he has touched. It’s slow, methodical, eerily beautiful, and striking at something profound while consistently burying the lead. Thought it was the winner of the juried award at this year’s Oak Cliff Film Festival, its formula might be starting to fade a bit.
When it comes to Taormina’s oeuvre, plots aren’t really the point. They’re there, sure, but are generally as basic as they come and only serve as a springboard for whatever emotionality he is attempting to convey through his images. No Sleep Till is about a group of disparate people in Florida, living their lives as a hurricane barrels towards them. While most evacuate to safety, a few renegades stick it out, and the film follows their individual journeys, including a storm chaser and an aimless teenager.
The hurricane, itself, is clearly a metaphor for what these folks are experiencing, an impending “something” that looms over them, just as baseball in Eephus meant way more than our simple national pastime. We spend most of the film exploring the Florida vistas, the highways and city streets, and we get a real sense of place. Having grown up in Alabama and visited Florida regularly, this feels more like a Florida film than most, evoking the same sort of sense-memory for geography as Barry Jenkins’ 2016 Moonlight did so eloquently. It’s a Florida we don’t normally get to see, and it’s as stunning at night as it is haunting.
But that’s not enough. I wish it were. I really wish it were. But it’s not. No Sleep Till feels more aimless than any of Taormina’s projects before it, with writer/director Alexandra Simpson (marking her debut behind the camera) spending even less time putting words in her actors’ mouths than those before her. And it’s not that I need dialogue in a film, per se, but the characters here don’t even feel like characters. They feel like cyphers. At times, it’s as if Simpson is just playing pretend with the actors, as if she were a three-year-old creating imaginative scenarios for her My Little Pony toys. But it’s difficult to invest in characters that are defined entirely by their surroundings.
Whereas Eephus made us feel as if we were being given access to conversations and throwaway remarks we’d normally not get to hear, No Sleep Till deprives us of those in equal measure. I hesitate to use the word “boring” when it comes to the film, but it might be the most apt. There were times when I found myself checking out. That hasn’t happened in any of Taormina’s efforts to this point, and I truly hope it was an anomaly, and not what I fear, which is that his style of cinema, however unique, begins to feel repetitive at a certain point.
The comparisons to mumblecore are impossible to ignore. But both look at narrative in a very different way. With mumblecore, the whole idea was to let the actors create the story as they went. With Taormina’s style, which I will call “surfacecore” (because all the intentionality and motivations are conveyed under the surface), the plot is secondary to the connection between the characters and their surroundings. It feels both scripted and improvised; both painstakingly thought-out and thrown-together. The mystery behind the truth of that is what normally makes the films so involving.
Here, though, it just feels far more thrown-together than thought-out. It feels as if they had a camera, an amazing cinematographer, and a town to shoot in, so that’s all that was needed to greenlight the picture. Had they spent even an extra week on thinking through the screenplay, such as it is, I cannot imagine there wouldn’t have been discoveries. And if the film turned out exactly the way they wanted and they felt as if they had discovered everything available to them, I would challenge the conclusion.
All issues aside, I can understand why this took home the juried award at Oak Cliff Film Festival. This is a film that feels more profound than it is. While watching, I was constantly assuming I was missing something. I watched it a second time to confirm I was not. But it sure feels like something meaningful when you’re in the throes of it, unless you have that part of your brain (like I do) that slowly starts sensing something is missing. When you figure that out, it’s difficult to let it go, and you find yourself over-analyzing what’s there.
And what’s there isn’t much. Is it beautiful? Sure. Is it told with confidence? Absolutely. But confidence only matters if you can execute, and No Sleep Till struggles in that department. It’s not a style thing for me, as I have loved many of the Taormina-associated projects. It’s all in the final product here, and I just cannot accept that this film is entirely what the filmmakers wanted it to be. If I’m wrong, I’m wrong, but these mashed potatoes needed gravy. Without it, what’s left just feels sort of dry.
Billy Ray Brewton
Billy Ray Brewton is the producer and founder of Make Believe Theatricals, which specializes in promoting unique creative voices that exist outside the mainstream. Billy Ray was the subject of the award-winning documentary, Skanks (Slamdance 2014); wrote and directed the award-winning dramatic horror film Show Yourself (Bruce Campbell’s Horror Film Fest 2017); produced the award-winning documentary Socks on Fire (Tribeca 2020, “Best Documentary Feature”); and served as associate producer on the horror anthology, The Mortuary Collection (Fantastic Fest 2019, “Audience Choice Best Feature”). The short film he produced in 2016, Pool Shark, currently has over 100 million views on YouTube. His next project as a producer, Mental Health and Horror, is scheduled for release in 2025. He is a member of the Dramatists Guild, IDA, and Documentary Producers Alliance; is the ultimate heel on the Screen Drafts podcast; and writes about film for Cinepunx.