Before You Fade Away Into Nothing (Skinner Myers, 2025) shows off the strengths and perils of slow filmmaking. On the one hand, deliberate and weighted scenes, dripfeeding the viewer information and immersing them into a carefully-crafted world. On the other, an artificial atmosphere, dead weight, a padded runtime.
This aesthetic feels all the more self-conscious when it’s an American film set in a contemporary well-to-do world, the familiarity of everyday life (at least to me) at odds with the slowly-moving camera and highly-calculated tone.
But for every tradition, there are exemptions. Notable examples in the USA include Kelly Reichardt, James Benning and Jim Jarmusch, the latter of which seems to inspire Before with its morbid humour and deep-seated sincerity. Telling the story of two brothers “reconnecting” after the death of their father, Myers’ sophomore feature, following Slamdance entry The Sleeping Negro (2021), is a fascinating artistic experiment with much to recommend, even if the final product left me wanting.
It’s shot in black-and-white and opens on a long, protracted shot of a mountainside. Soon an epigraph from C.S Lewis appears: “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.” If one literary reference wasn’t enough, its quickly followed by a blinding white screen — evoking infinity, bliss, death, nothingness — and narrator Matthew Gibson III reciting from Dylan Thomas’ funeral staple “Do not go gentle into that good night” (1951).
If it wasn’t clear already, this is a film about death. What it means. How grief can change the very fabric of who you are, exploring the very different reactions to loss through two brothers: the chaotic Tristan (Skinner Myers, willingly self-effacing) and the straightlaced yuppie Malik (Nican Robinson). While Tristan is a chaotic individual, almost choking to death on his father’s gym equipment and peeing in bottles every night, Malik suffers from quiet panic attacks, records highly organised memos on his phone and simply can’t tolerate any of Tristan’s weird habits. Safe to say, they do not gel.
While following the tradition of grief-stricken siblings returning to the family home and coming to terms with the death of a loved one, making for an odd double feature with Good Children (Filip Peruzović, 2024), Myers unique aesthetic and oddball tone allows for many artistic flourishes; ghostly apparitions, split screen presentations, single camera takes, distorted lenses. Wait for the serious auteur classic: delaying the title sequence until nearly one-third through the runtime.
The humourous parts work best, with their only encounters with the outside world coming through mismatched conversations with food delivery workers and Uber drivers. The floundering cuts through what I felt was some unecessarily protracted sequences, not so much inviting us into this melancholic and absurd world but holding us at a remove, lest we get too close.
Still, I loved how mean-spirited the whole thing is — especially for an American film — avoiding the usual reconciliation clichés in favour of something far more horrible. With its uniquely unhappy family story, it reminds us that there is little dignity in grief, only an endless capacity for suffering.
Redmond is the editor-in-chief of Journey Into Cinema.