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Let the drugs kick in, then watch this. An official trailer is available for a psychedelic horror mystery film titled The Crescent that played at the Toronto Film Festival earlier this month. The Crescent is a new film from director Seth A. Smith (Lowlife), about a mother and her son who go to a beachfront summer home in hopes of healing after an unexpected death in the family. Once there, some totally weird things start to happen (or so it seems). There's some very abstract, mesmerizing, trippy footage in this trailer but it's hard to make any sense of it without seeing the film. The cast includes Danika Vandersteen, Britt Loder, Andrew Gillis, Woodrow Graves, & Terrance Murray. I'm not sure what to make of this. Take a look. Here's the first festival trailer (+ poster) for Seth A. Smith's The Crescent, direct from YouTube: After an unexpected death in the family,...

It starts by enveloping us in marbleizing paint — overlapping colors raked to warp dots into abstract patterns — and the loud aural pulses of a musical soundscape as heavy and permanent as those oils are fluidly malleable. We assume it’s merely a sensory aesthetic Seth A. Smith constructs to provide the tone for the subtle horrors still on the horizon, but don’t be surprised if you begin to interpret each new artwork as a self-portrait of characters we’ve yet to meet. Treat them as mood rings simultaneously displaying the strength of will and love to keep each hue from merging into muddy brown and the vulnerability of time folding in on itself like each layer of curved lines. They’re products of Beth’s (Danika Vandersteen) turmoil, a fight intentionally misconstrued.

Smith presents this overload of vision and sound as a contrast to the somberly quiet drama that...