Director Dalila Droes Makes an Auspicious Debut With ‘No More Time’

How far can a metaphor be stretched before it loses resilience? This question was brought to mind while watching Dalila Droege’s debut feature, “No More Time.” The inherent irony of Ms. Droege’s horror film about a worldwide pandemic is that it was made during a worldwide pandemic. Her film might seem to be more literal than metaphor would allow, which may be why the filmmaker considers “No More Time” a satire.In an interview with the Courier, Ms. Droege stated how she wanted to “have a bit of fun with it” — “it” being the Covid-19 lockdowns — “and poke holes in both sides of the political spectrum.” Forgetting, for a moment, that a spectrum has more than two sides, “No More Time” posits a world in which those who wear face masks and those who don’t are two very different species of human being. Should we not get the point, “No More Time” is punctuated with snippets of radio broadcasts by a Rush Limbaugh-like commentator casting aspersions on the actuality of the virus. “Some people,” Ms. Droege writes by way of contrast, “imagined that nature created this virus to get rid of the human problem on our planet. It was a strangely comforting idea.” Strangely comforting, huh? One woman’s meat is another woman’s calamity, but nihilism is no substitute for constructive environmentalism. Thank the graces of genre conventions, then, that the received ideological commonplaces threaded throughout Ms. Droege’s post-apocalyptic picture play second fiddle to thrills and chills.Mark Reeb in ‘No More Time.’ Via VerticalThanks should also be extended to cinematographer Jay Keitel: “No More Time” is a ravishing visual experience. The film was made at Crested Butte, Colorado, a former mining town that is now primarily a host to an array of winter activities. Mr. Keitel’s camera cruises, from on high and down low, through a landscape dense with birch trees. A panoply of rich tones predominate, as does repeated compositional mirroring of nature’s beauty. Symmetry undergirds Ms. Droege’s picture.“No More Time” centers on Steve (Mark Reeb) and Hilaire (Jennifer Harlow), a married couple given to, respectively, roughhewn stridency and waif-like concentration. They travel through sparsely traveled highways and townships in which few, if any, citizens are encountered. The rare individuals Steve and Hilaire come into contact with tend toward being antagonistic. Those who seem to be approachable, like the chummy Chuck (David Sullivan), are held at arm’s length. All and sundry tote guns. Suspicion is the rule of law.Familiar turf, don’t you think? Progenitors for this kind of thing include John Sturges’ “Bad Day at Black Rock” (1955), Sydney Salkow’s “The Last Man on Earth” (1964), and Reed Morano’s underrated “I Think We’re Alone Now” (2018), as well as any number of zombie films. The latter, I am happy to report, are nowhere in evidence in these Rocky Mountains, but there is a Native-American shaman, various woodland nymphs, and a siren in a nearby lake that emerges from its depths in the all-together. On a less mystical note, there’s also Noah (Tunde Adebimpe), a soft-spoken resident of the town into which Steve and Hilaire take shelter. He takes their intrusion with rare equanimity. The plot takes some odd and not entirely convincing turns, but the overall tone is cerebral and, notwithstanding the random burst of mayhem, more meditative than not. Ms. Droege knows that a genre exercise or, as is her stated goal, “a midnight movie,” finds its aesthetic rationale in locating variation and idiosyncrasy within circumscribed limits. Her film is, in the end, an imperfect venture and an auspicious debut. Should you be a sucker for the hard choices that come with the end of the world as we know it, there’s time aplenty for “No More Time.”

Director Dalila Droes Makes an Auspicious Debut With ‘No More Time’

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