When the Dream Becomes the Scream — of the Audience
There are bad movies, and then there are Twixt—films so cosmically confused that they could only have been made by a once-great filmmaker locked in a battle with his own legacy and a green screen. Francis Ford Coppola, the man who gave us The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, and Dracula, apparently woke up one morning, stared at his reflection, and said, “You know what the world needs? Val Kilmer fighting his writer’s block with the help of Edgar Allan Poe and a vampire child.”
The result is Twixt — part gothic ghost story, part small-town murder mystery, part dream journal gone horribly wrong. It’s as if Coppola wrote a script on Ambien, edited it during a séance, and then decided to direct it in the middle of a fever.
The Plot (and That’s Being Generous)
Val Kilmer stars as Hall Baltimore, a washed-up horror novelist best known for writing “bargain bin witch-hunter” books — imagine Stephen King if he lived in a van and smelled like whiskey and regret. Hall’s career is circling the drain, his wife (Joanne Whalley, clearly questioning her life choices) hates him, and he spends most of his time at sad book signings in towns where even the sheriff moonlights as a fanfiction writer.
Said sheriff, played by Bruce Dern — because every movie this messy needs a conspiracy-huffing grandpa — takes Hall on a tour of the local morgue. There, they find a teenage murder victim who may or may not be connected to a vampire cult. Dern, in his best “I’m just here for the paycheck” energy, tells Kilmer this would make a great story. Kilmer, for reasons never fully explained (or remotely logical), agrees.
And then, dear reader, the movie leaves Earth entirely.
Hall falls asleep and wakes up in a dream version of the town — a foggy, CGI-laden purgatory where time is broken, logic is on strike, and Elle Fanning plays V, a spectral girl with braces and a personality made entirely of whispering. She warns him about the town’s dark secrets, the seven clocks that all tell different times, and possibly his cholesterol levels. Then, Edgar Allan Poe shows up (Ben Chaplin, looking like he’s trapped in a Hot Topic perfume ad) and starts giving life advice.
That’s right. Francis Ford Coppola made a movie where Val Kilmer gets therapy from Edgar Allan Poe.
When the Dream Logic Is Just… Logic That’s Broken
Every time Kilmer falls asleep, we enter another “dream world,” a phrase that here means “Coppola’s laptop running outdated CGI software.” The dream scenes are shot in garish color filters — part black and white, part blue neon, part “Windows 98 screensaver.”
It’s supposed to feel haunting, but it looks more like a Tim Burton fever dream sponsored by Pepto-Bismol. Elle Fanning drifts in and out like a ghost who overslept her haunting appointment. Poe rambles about guilt, death, and the creative process, which is fitting since those are also the feelings you’ll experience while watching this film.
Meanwhile, the waking world isn’t much better. Kilmer wanders around in a cowboy hat, drunk on both whiskey and misplaced ambition, trying to “solve” the town’s mystery — a mystery so convoluted that even Scooby-Doo would’ve told everyone to pack it up and go home.
Val Kilmer vs. The Script (Spoiler: The Script Loses)
Kilmer gives a performance that feels like he’s auditioning for The Room 2: Literary Boogaloo. He mumbles, rants, and occasionally breaks into an improvised Elvis impression for no discernible reason. Yes, you read that right — there’s a full minute where he impersonates Elvis Presley in front of a mirror.
You can almost see Coppola behind the camera thinking, Yes, this will be my comeback.
By the film’s second act, Kilmer’s writer’s block becomes a metaphor for Coppola’s directorial one. Both men wander around a sleepy American town, haunted by ghosts of their past achievements, desperately searching for meaning while an entire audience wonders if the catering table served hallucinogens.
Elle Fanning, the Gothic Lollipop
Elle Fanning, to her credit, tries to bring gravitas to her role as the ethereal V, but it’s hard to act haunting when the script gives you lines like “I’m not dead… I’m just twixt.” (Yes, she actually says that.) She flits through fog like a sentient perfume commercial, alternately whispering about murder and looking wistful about braces.
She’s supposed to represent innocence corrupted by evil, or the muse of lost creativity, or maybe just Coppola’s Wi-Fi signal — the symbolism shifts every five minutes. Still, she’s one of the few watchable things in the movie, mainly because she doesn’t seem to realize she’s in one.
Bruce Dern: Sheriff of Exposition County
Then there’s Bruce Dern, who plays Sheriff Bobby LaGrange, a man who builds vampire-staking machines in his spare time and delivers exposition like he’s narrating a conspiracy podcast. He’s easily the film’s MVP, chewing scenery and dialogue with the gusto of a man who knows he’ll never have to watch this movie sober.
When Dern starts describing a vampire murder mystery with a straight face, you start to wonder if he’s the one who wrote the script. At least someone on set looked like they were having fun.
The Horror of Bad CGI and Worse Metaphors
Coppola claimed that Twixt was inspired by a dream he had after his son Gian-Carlo’s death — a deeply personal starting point that somehow resulted in a film that looks like it was rendered on an Etch A Sketch.
The visual effects are tragic. The dream sequences have the aesthetic of a MySpace background circa 2006. The fog looks like spilled milk, the blood looks like cranberry juice, and the vampire fangs resemble cheap Halloween store props.
Every shot screams “unfinished student project,” which is particularly sad considering this is a $7 million film by the man who once commanded Apocalypse Now’s budget of a small country.
The “Twist” (or: How to Waste a Perfectly Good Dream Sequence)
By the end, Kilmer discovers that the real horror isn’t the murder mystery, or the vampires, or the haunted child — it’s his own guilt over his daughter’s death in a boating accident. Poe helps him “find peace,” which apparently means writing a new vampire novel that his publisher loves.
So the entire movie was, in essence, the world’s most elaborate case of writer’s block. The dreams, the ghosts, the murders — all just a metaphor for creativity.
You can almost hear the collective groan of the audience as they realize they sat through an hour and a half of moody nonsense just to learn the monster was depression all along.
The Coppola Conundrum
Coppola has said he wanted Twixt to be a “small, personal film” about guilt, creativity, and nightmares. Mission partially accomplished — it’s small, it’s personal, and it’s absolutely a nightmare.
Watching it feels like intruding on someone’s private therapy session, except it’s projected on a 40-foot screen and stars a sweaty Val Kilmer arguing with Edgar Allan Poe.
It’s not scary. It’s not funny. It’s not even stylish in a “so bad it’s good” way. It’s just baffling — a cinematic séance conducted by a once-great artist trying to communicate with his own dead career.
Final Thoughts: The Godfather of Confusion
The Godfather made us an offer we couldn’t refuse. Twixt makes one we can’t understand. It’s the kind of movie that leaves you staring at the screen, muttering, “Wait… was that a metaphor? Or just bad editing?”
Coppola may have intended Twixt to explore the thin line between dreams and reality. Instead, he found the thick wall between inspiration and self-parody.
Final Rating: 🧛♀️🕰️🍷 1 out of 5 Broken Typewriters
Because in the eternal conflict between art and madness, Twixt chooses madness — and then forgets to make it interesting.
