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The film's script was written by Benjamin Brand, who had written and sold several unproduced screenplays to studios. Brand had served as an assistant to producer Danielle Renfrew on the film Groove (2000), which was directed by Greg Harrison. Brand, Renfrew and Harrison were friends and living in their hometown of San Francisco developing separate projects at "Major film studios#Mini majors" studios which, according to Renfrew, were "wallowing in development hell". Brand saw a news story about a store robbery in which the robber had hidden the body of the cashier behind the counter and then impersonated the cashier as customers came in. Drawing from this story as well as from experiences in his own life (he had previously taught photography at the Academy of Art), Brand wrote a screenplay and presented it to Renfrew and Harrison. Both were impressed, and Harrison said it was "fascinating kind of an abstract exercise in narrative, which I thought was exciting and bold". Brand and Harrison worked through several drafts of the script over the following six months. Harrison, who cited the death of a close friend as one of his personal inspirations for the film, focused on inserting more emotional elements into the script; in his words they were "trying to express the subjective experience of trauma". Before the development of the film, Harrison had cast actress Courteney Cox in a Garry Trudeau scripted ensemble film being developed at Fox Searchlight. Cox was a comic actress widely known for her role on the television sitcom Friends and had participated in only a handful of more serious productions. While the Garry Trudeau project was intended as a comedy, Harrison said he felt Cox was "very capable of drama and was very willing and wanted to transcend her comedic persona".

Harrison, Brand and Renfrew intended the film to be set and shot in San Francisco, but problems arose with their proposal. Cox had a commitment to Friends, which was in production in Los Angeles, and the film's production costs did not allow the entire production team to relocate to northern California for the duration for the shoot. The filmmakers were forced to shoot in Los Angeles, but Renfrew later expressed no regret in their decision: "We wanted the story to take place in an anonymous urban area. And I think we were successful in doing that". The film's cinematographer was Nancy Schreiber, who had never before shot a film on Mini DV. Harrison intended the shifts between chapters of the film—and Sophie's emotions—to be signalled visually, and he instructed Schreiber to employ different colour casts accordingly. For the opening robbery scenes (which recur throughout the film), Schreiber purchased two Panasonic AG DVX100 cameras with white balance and color temperature controls. She used them with lighting gels and sodium street lamps that surrounded the real life convenience store where the crew was shooting to make the image appear green. A similar process was used in the second movement of the narrative, which was bathed in orange to represent Sophie's despair, while white expressed "acceptance" in the film's third and final act. To help achieve a blue colour cast for the first phase of the film ("denial"), Schreiber surrounded the shooting locations with machines that pumped smoke across the set. Cinematographer and Sundance Film Festival judge Frederick Elmes commented of Schreiber's work, "She lit it and used colors in a way that the camera responded. And I don't think that's the kind of thing you do by accident. That's completely designed". Harrison applauded the speed of Mini DV for allowing such a short shoot: "We could shoot with multiple cameras at times, which helped us in our schedule". and Variety's Todd McCarthy writing that the film was "a stylistic tour de force dedicated more to constructing a cinematic puzzle than to providing dramatic satisfaction". Producers were reluctant to sell the picture to a distributor quickly, and gossip blogger Roger Friedman of Fox News commented that they "may have overplayed their hand in juggling offers". The film was sold later that year to Sony Pictures Classics, which had handled Groove. The film’s theatrical release date was moved to the following summer after Courteney Cox, who was then pregnant, gave birth to her first child. In the meantime, the film was screened outside the United States at the Oslo International Film Festival on November 20, 2004. On April 26, 2005, the film was screened at the San Francisco International Film Festival, whose organisers described it as an "homage to the mindbending thrillers of David Lynch Inspired by the perception versus reality mindgames of Mulholland Drive and the eerie psychological aesthetic of Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now". Audience response at its screening at the festival was generally positive, but critic Brandon Judell dismissed the film as "highly irritating and nonsensical," while Joanne Bealy said it was "a Mulholland Drive / David Lynch copycat even at 88 minutes, it was too long for me." The film screened at the Seattle International Film Festival on May 31, 2005 and the Los Angeles Film Festival on June 22, 2005.

In its first weekend of release in the United States, November grossed $21,813 at eight theatres, and it debuted at number sixty three on the box office chart. It peaked at number fifty nine in its second weekend (aided by its expansion into nine more theatres) and generated $192,186 in ticket sales over twelve weeks. but Sony Pictures Classics chose to expand the film into no more than 27 theaters (in its sixth week). The New York Daily News was more negative in its summary of the film, labelling it a "convoluted and unsatisfying psychological drama." Mark Holcomb of The Village Voice said the film was "less compelling the more apparent its solution becomes. But before the foregone conclusion surfaces about halfway through, its disparate, unnerving components are mesmerizing." F. X. Feeney of the LA Weekly wrote, "it never becomes a mystery, like, say, Mulholland Drive, or even The Sixth Sense (despite the gimmicky magnitude of its final reveal)". while the Seattle Post Intelligencer called it "a low watt reworking of M. Night Shyamalan and David Lynch." Scott Tobias of The A. V. Club wrote, "with each successive trip back to the scene, things only become murkier and less compelling, lost in pretentious symbolism and obvious visual signposts". Michael Sragow of the Baltimore Sun made a similar criticism, saying, "Benjamin Brand's script is a puzzle without a satisfying solution." Chicago Sun Times critic Roger Ebert, who drew comparisons between the film's narrative and Elisabeth Kübler Ross's five stages of dying model, argued "answers would be beside the point. Any other explanation, for example a speech by the psychiatrist or the cop explaining exactly what has really happened, would be contrivance. Better to allow November to descend into confusion and despair [it] does not bargain and does not explain." In Entertainment Weekly, Lisa Schwarzbaum identified the film as "an homage to the work of David Hockney: Just as Hockney assembles smaller, overlapped Polaroids that don't necessarily make sense into a big picture that does". Marc Mohan of The Oregonian dismissed the film as "a post Memento, mess with your head thriller that thinks it's much cleverer than it is", but commented that Courteney Cox "doesn't embarrass herself" in her role, while The Hollywood Reporter felt that she was "as convincing as she could possibly be." Most praise in reviews was directed towards cinematographer Nancy Schreiber's work on the film. Tobias said the film "makes the most of its visual limitations", Kirk Honeycutt cited Schreiber as "the movie's real heroine, as she dramatically meshes the real with the surreal, creating different looks and emotions for each segment through light and color," while Jack Mathews wrote, "I suspect that it was her work—perhaps alone—that changed "November's" fate from a direct to video release to a brief first run in theaters." On review aggregate website Rotten Tomatoes, November has an approval rating of 31% based on 80 reviews. The site’s critics consensus reads, "Murky and too artsy for its own good, November ends up being a case of style with little substance.

At the 2004 Sundance Film Festival, Nancy Schreiber won the award for Dramatic Excellence in Cinematography. Schreiber said the win was "quite a shock, since it was on mini dv and we were up against films shot on film". Danielle Renfrew was nominated for the Producers Award at the 2004 Independent Spirit Awards for her work on November and Groove.