Upon one’s first viewing, it does seem difficult to know where to begin with Happer’s Comet, the feature debut from director/editor Tyler Taormina. Filmed on Long Island in the early days of the COVID-19 lockdown, the movie exists entirely outside of any easy consideration or classification, following a group of nameless, silent faces over the course of a single night (in what year or month, we neither know nor especially need to) of restless reflection and anxious energy. This is less an experimental film than it is an experiential one – constantly invoking feeling through its combination of image and sound, instead of merely a director playing around with the features of his camera and our perception of action and rhythm (even though there is plenty of the latter, too).
The humans truly do not matter to Taormina, who himself is one of more than two dozen actors who show up on screen over the course of its shockingly brief 62 minutes. That is, until they very much matter in a final shot that suggests human connection of a particularly intimate kind, in a setting only hinted at by the film’s confounding opening shot of a rotting ear of corn. The soundtrack, which is otherwise entirely diegetic, is clearly somehow an invention of someone on the film’s crew, as there is no obvious external source to what begins with soft country medley and shifts suddenly mid-shot into a score more befitting of a horror film. What follows evokes this shot constantly, as the small, midnight actions of a townsfolk reveal something decomposing in the suburbs.
Every one of these people is – to their very core, it would seem – a night owl. One woman wanders around her house, unable to sleep in her bed, eventually nodding off on the kitchen table. Another appears to float, discombobulated, through her own home, though she wears roller blades on her feet and seems called, like so many others in the town, to its center for some strange, preternatural reason. A man drives recklessly through town, barely staying awake at the wheel, while a trio of men move a stalled car up a steep climb. Another man simply exists in his job, until he gets the bright idea to perform push ups for no one in particular, while elsewhere a janitor listens to a nice, slow song and practically dances with his mop.
These are the scenes that make up the “story” of the movie, which is to say that the movie does not have one – at least, insofar as a “story” is a series of connected events with a stated purpose and a structure. All these people, like the woman on roller blades, are eventually called by some impulse within themselves to investigate that impulse (and some of the others also eventually don roller blades, by the way), which leads to a final scene as confounding and inventive as anything else Taormina concocts before it. It’s all about enveloping the viewer in the ambient sounds of this neighborhood and dazzling them with its cryptic use of shadow and light (seemingly from only natural sources, unless a spotlight or flashlight is present).
Yes, it’s difficult to know where to begin with Happer’s Comet, but not because the experience is especially frustrating in any tangible way. Some movies force the viewer’s metabolism to slow to its level, and so for all intents and purposes, Taormina has made here a work of Slow Cinema – a consistently fascinating and intellectually rewarding cinematic movement that demands attention and pays it back with constant reminders of what the movies are all about.
Photo courtesy of Factory 25
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