Between Moonlight, 20th Century Women, American Honey, The Witch, Green Room, The Lobster, Swiss Army Man, Ex Machina and many others, it is clear that A24 has cemented its status as one of the country’s premier independent film studios. With this kind of prestige comes the clout to pull audacious marketing stunts, and that is precisely what the studio has just done in releasing an enigmatic trailer for an untitled film.
This teaser is, to say the least, intriguing. Structured around a series of metaphysical-sounding phrases where the last word of one phrase is an iteration of the first word in the next (e.g. “Beyond Reality” is followed by “Realize Feeling,” which is in turn followed by “Feel Bare”), the trailer navigates an otherwise wordless sequence of evocative images that seems to hail from the Upstream Color and Under the Skin camp of elusive sci-fi filmmaking. An infant wriggles lightly before the camera. A young man gazes at his reflection in a mirror. A tear trails down a woman’s face. An odd, silver pod-like object appears twice, once in an extreme-close-up that could be a citation of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Meanwhile, a reverberative, ambient soundtrack lends import and menace to the proceedings, carrying the bemused viewer to the film’s final phrase, “Live Beyond,” which could describe the movie itself: beyond our comprehension at this point, though promising to be alive with wonders.
Check out the full trailer above, and stay tuned for any updates on A24’s mystery project.