It’s hard to describe The Show based on the trailer alone, and the official synopsis doesn’t offer much in the way of clarity, so here’s what we know: it’s a surreal, very weird-looking movie starring Tom Burke (The Souvenir), who would be the British Robert Pattinson if Robert Pattinson wasn’t already British, and Alan Moore—as in the iconic comic book writer responsible for Watchmen and Batman: The Killing Joke, among numerous others. There’s quite a bit of fantasy and it may or may not take place in more than one time period or reality—honestly, who the hell can tell from this trailer?
Moore, however, is absolutely serving you some Mac Tonight drag. Of that we are certain. The Show is directed by Mitch Jenkins, who previously collaborated with Moore on 2014's Show Pieces—an anthology film consisting of three shorts apparently set in the same “Northampton netherworld.” Here’s the official synopsis, which is definitely a collection of sentences strung together:
A frighteningly focussed man of many talents, passports and identities arrives at England’s broken heart, a haunted midlands town that has collapsed to a black hole of dreams, only to find that this new territory is as at least as strange and dangerous as he is. Attempting to locate a certain person and a certain artefact for his insistent client, he finds himself sinking in a quicksand twilight world of dead Lotharios, comatose sleeping beauties, Voodoo gangsters, masked adventurers, unlikely 1930s private eyes and violent chiaroscuro women…and this is Northampton when it’s still awake. Once the town closes its eyes there is another world entirely going on beneath the twitching lids, a world of glittering and sinister delirium much worse than any social or economic devastation. Welcome to the British nightmare, with its gorgeous flesh, its tinsel and its luminous light-entertainment monsters; its hallucinatory austerity.
