Full disclosure: I am good friends with the director.

Happer’s Comet, the new film by Tyler Taormina — one of the key members of the Omnes Films collective, which has emerged as one of the most promising lights in the American independent film scene — heralds a bold step forward. A slender, crepuscular experience, the 62-minute feature was filmed during the COIVD pandemic on the director’s native Long Island with both a skeleton crew (consisting just of himself and cinematographer Jesse Sperling) and an unpredictable, expansive cast of family and fellow denizens. Set seemingly over the course of a single night, the film eschews all audible dialogue, though this is still a film based very much on at least the suggestion of language — songs floating ethereally through the air, idle police radio chatter, televisions left on droning in the night — and plays like a feature-length exploration of a similar milieu as Taormina’s debut Ham on Rye. Where that film more explicitly cast its nighttime exploration as the curdling of teenage wonder and possibility, Happer’s Comet is more free-floating and reliant purely on Taormina’s considerable image-making skill: the majority of shots appear to be lit with a single off-screen source blasting through the darkness, and the recurring motif of roller-skating lends a potent anachronistic feeling. Though it concludes with the rising of the sun, Happer’s Comet proudly, deservedly wears its status as a film out of time.