B'twixt Now and Sunrise

Elle Fanning

Francis Ford Coppola's B'twixt Now and Sunrise is an unsuccessful horror film which Coppola has been tinkering with for over ten years. Shot in 2011 and briefly released under the title Twixt, the film follows a low rent horror novelist named Hall Baltimore (Val Kilmer) on a book tour of Northern California. During the tour, he becomes fixated on an old mass murder case. In his dreams, Baltimore is haunted by a mysterious girl (Elle Fanning) and the specter of Edgar Poe (Ben Chaplin).

Unfortunately, the narrative makes even less sense than the one in Coppola's Dementia 13. Chaplin and Fanning are quite game, but Kilmer seems lost and ill at ease. Best in show is Bruce Dern as a batty sheriff. I enjoyed Coppola's expressionist mise-en-scene, reminiscent of Rumblefish and Bram Stoker's Dracula, but the end result resembles a bad Gut Maddin film.