![]() ![]() Now, this doesn’t mean that I consider it a film to be put on a pedestal. This beautifully orchestrated cinematography brings life to the atmosphere of the film, which in the end, is what seems to give it its primal identity. When shifting from the real world to the dream sequences, the screen sucks out all the colour of the originally brown-toned contrasted image to reveal an unsaturated world of blacks and whites, leaving space for only a few hints of vivid colour, like the red blood dripping off a victim’s forehead. While one can feel the play between the different styles of language, from the cheeky interactions between the characters in Swan Valley to the poetic introspections given by Poe in the protagonist’s dreams, the same is found in the visual representation of these two worlds. Intersecting different genres is what makes things interesting in the end. How does the comedic aspect of the failed writer who tells his wife “People always ask me ‘How do you know so much about witches?’ and I tell them ‘because I married one’” fit within the veil of horror and a thrilling mystery that covers the unfolding of the story? Well, it just does. It might seem incoherent and a bit all over the place. With a budget of around 7 million dollars, Twixt took what it could get and embraced its possibilities into becoming the peculiar cinematic experiment that its director set it out to be. ![]() This convinces him to go look for the truth and sparks the start of an obscure hunt between the real world, in which writer’s block disables him to go forth, and the dream world, where Edgar Allan Poe serves as a guiding figure for the completion of the story.Ĭoppola believes that “the smaller the budget, the bigger the ideas can be”, and that is perhaps what attracted me in this film: it’s freedom to be whatever it wants it to be. ![]() While sleeping, Hall dreams of a ghost named V (Elle Fanning) who induces him further into the grotesque story that lays underneath the town’s secrets. This strange character informs him of the town’s unsolved murder of a young girl and suggests that they use this mystery to write a book together. In it, we meet Hall Baltimore (played by Val Kilmer), a writer in decline whose book signing in the town’s hardware store lead him to the encounter of Sheriff Bobby LaGrange. This film, plunged into a setting of gothic romance, invites you into the mid-western town of Swan Valley, introduced as “a town of those who want to be left alone”. Although no other feature film has been in production since Twixt surely adheres to the requirements set. In relation to the film’s release, Coppola stated: “At this point in my life, I think of any film I undertake as having three requirements: must be an original story, must have some personal element, and must be self-financed”. In its low-budget and experimental nature, it actually feels closer to the director’s initial relationship to cinema, seeing that his debut in the industry includes various horror shorts and the horror-thriller Dementia 13. However, not in the sense that would make it a lesser film – it’s simply different. It surely stands far from the classic masterpieces like The Godfather and Apocalypse Now that have made him one of the top American filmmakers from the Movie Brats generation. Since the time of its release, “Twixt” has been one of my most enjoyable screenings, although I still haven’t completely figured out why. After dedicating all my attention to the big screen that had been projecting all kinds of flickering lights and sounds into my brain, and finally taking that satisfying gulp of air one feels allowed to take once the credits roll, I felt like the past hour and a half couldn’t have been better spent than sitting in that red seat feeding off of Francis Ford Coppola’s imagination. ![]()
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