Synopsis
Between the living and the dead, evil is waiting.
A declining writer arrives in a small town where he gets caught up in a murder mystery involving a young girl.
2011 Directed by Francis Ford Coppola
A declining writer arrives in a small town where he gets caught up in a murder mystery involving a young girl.
Val Kilmer Bruce Dern Elle Fanning Ben Chaplin Joanne Whalley David Paymer Anthony Fusco Alden Ehrenreich Bruce A. Miroglio Don Novello Lisa Bailes Ryan Simpkins Lucas Rice Jordan Fiona Medaris Katie Crom Tom Waits Stacey Mattina Lorraine Gaudet Dorothy Tchelistcheff Lucy Bunter Kristine Hayworth Marisa Lenhardt Davia Schendel
Twixt: Now and Sunrise, Paraisthiseis, Virginia
'Twixt' is a film aptly named, one hard to tease or puzzle out, but easy to love. Probably the most Francis Ford Coppola movie in the history of Francis Ford Coppola movies, this movie has nearly everything in it but belongs to no one set genre or style. The film it is closest to in FFC's catalog is 'Rumble Fish', which was a smaller, more personal and experimental take on the kind of story told in 'The Outsiders', so maybe it is possible to think of this as a greatly delayed 'Rumble Vampire', as thematically and even visually, it takes many cues from 'Bram Stoker's Dracula', and, like 'Rumble Fish', frequently operates in black and white with highlights and aspects…
i just found out that coppola lost his son in a speedboating accident and that he incorporated his life and trauma with the death of his boy into this film, he positions himself as val kilmer who loses his child in the film the same way. 25 years of grieving and still he had to put it into this film, his grief, his suffering and the state of consciousness where he can maybe deal with it after all this time. he'll always be gone and the scars never fade, your child being dead for longer than he was alive leaves an emotional wound that i can't possibly imagine dealing with. this is the closest he can get to catharsis, putting it into his art, trying to continue and process the pain with his films. the film was already so deeply profound and now it hits harder than just about anything.
rest in peace, gian-carlo, your memory will always live on
a digital gothic horror mystery with formal experimentation, meditations on grief and on the creative process, blends dreams with reality and shows how our dreams can help us to understand not only the history of the world around us but ourselves and our struggles with guilt and depression and ennui through gazing into the deepest corners of our psyches, and subconsciously providing the catharsis we need or at least sets us on the trail for us to properly deal with our psychological traumas and general malcontent. this also has val kilmer as an alcoholic horror novelist with a manbun, beautiful cinematography and exceptional use of colour particularly in the dream sequences where everything is in black and white except for…
"Can't change time. Time changes you."
And also
"You gotta have a lot of story, none of that style bullshit."
Twixt, a power struggle on the road to timelessness. Kilmer's dreams are another step toward the past, his interests shift, evolve, progress, yet his search is a constant means of discovery with regard to things that have already happened - things he already knows - Kilmer, until now, has just refused to accept the facts. Time is merely a distortion of integrity, stop trying to outrun it and then honesty may be found. Coppola's greatest achievement.
"I don't have an ending."
Also:
"Keeping track of time around here is pointless."
And:
"Oh, be careful what you do..."
Finally:
"It was a town of those who wanted to be left alone. And so they were."
Francis Ford Coppola makes his Roger Corman Poe movie, a deeply personal tale about writing and regret. Messy but lovely.
"Our work must be the grave that we prepare for its lovely talent." -Poe,
- Francis Ford Coppola Ranked: boxd.it/8GFCC
I always knew The Godfather, the Godfather Part II, Dracula, Apocalypse Now, One From the Heart, Rumble Fish, Peggy Sue Got Married, The Conversation, and The Outsiders were flukes.
daylight’s fashionable glossy hyperreality is transformed into near-monochrome gothic fantasia at night. radical discontinuties of time, running too fast and too much and yet frozen by grief. Coppola exorcises the ghosts which narrative forms silence and brick over; the ground we stand on is revealed to be nothing but tombstones (Edgar Allan Poe stayed there once, didn’t you know?). abrasive juxtaposition (spatial, temporal, and tonal) tears at the insides of a tired genre exercise until it’s as bleeding and battered as the innocence it exploits, only to finally put a stake through its own still-beating heart. the most immolating horror film of the decade, convinced none of us have grappled with this nearly enough
“you are the ending you seek”
Seems way too dense to fully unravel on an initial viewing, but after watching this I think this may be my favourite Francis Ford Coppola picture not named The Conversation. Coppola taps into the Roger Corman doing Edgar Allen Poe (Poe is actually in this!) aesthetic in a new digital world. The world Hall Baltimore (Val Kilmer) finds himself returning to in trying to unravel this story, and doubles as finding his muse, is one of gothic beauty. It is misty, moonswept, grey, and when blood pours it's metallic red. It may be "bargain basement Stephen King" but he finds horror, elegance, and humour in that kind of b-movie schlock. I'm baffled at how this gained a reputation as a…
A gorgeous and subtle gothic horror fable capable of teaching the audiences new branches of literary appreciation through the decline of the career of a writer, Twixt is a misunderstood film showcasing the tragedy of the surrounding reality melding with your own in order to create a horrific piece of fiction that speaks books about said reality. All artworks are derivative from their surrounding circumstances, but there is no greater inherent horror in an artform when, unwillingly, your reality begins to thrust its way into your pieces of creation.
Almost on par with Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness, the realm dream should be interpreted as the author's traumatic process of unwilling intertextuality into his upcoming body of work where…