With just three features to his name, Tyler Taormina has cemented himself as one of the most perceptive chroniclers of small-town America. His 2019 debut, Ham on Rye, tracked a gaggle of high school seniors as they geared up for prom night and life away from home. Shot by Taormina’s regular cinematographer, Carson Lund, the film heralded two motifs that would haunt the director’s cinema. On the one hand, an interest in immortalizing perfectly anonymous stretches of US suburbia as dreamlike, surreal terrains; on the other, an unresolved tension between our need for communion and the forces that inevitably pull us apart.

Everyone longs to connect in Taormina’s films, but few ever manage––a tragic state of affairs that was basically the plot of Happer’s Comet (2022), a nocturnal snapshot of a US town and a few of its residents, all of them captured as they wait, alone,...