Every­thing is fan­tas­tic in the first trail­er for About Endlessness

It takes no more than a sin­gle glance to iden­ti­fy a film by Roy Ander­s­son as such: the pal­lid-faced and down­trod­den peo­ple, the intri­cate­ly designed worlds in shades of sick­ly tan and grey, the grind­ing machin­ery of the mil­i­tary-indus­tri­al com­plex. The first trail­er for the Swedish master’s lat­est film only fea­tures a few shots, but that’s fine. We only need the one.

About End­less­ness will soon world-pre­mière at the Venice Film Fes­ti­val and then go on to play one week lat­er at the Toron­to Inter­na­tion­al Film Fes­ti­val, occa­sion­ing the first clip from the film to appear online. It’s the Ander­s­son that his self-select­ing but ded­i­cat­ed fan­base knows and loves, with all the gal­lows humor and snail-slow pac­ing that implies.

While the trail­er doesn’t give up much in the way of premise, an item from Indiewire claims that ​“the film takes on a nar­ra­tor who occu­pies the role of Scheherazade from Ara­bi­an Nights, guid­ing us from one skit to anoth­er along the periph­ery of a war.” One bleak yet epic shot cap­tures the trudge of pris­on­ers across a des­o­late, icy wasteland.

It’s been five years since Ander­s­son com­plet­ed his infor­mal ​“liv­ing tril­o­gy” with A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflect­ing on Exis­tence, sug­gest­ing that Ander­s­son may per­haps move in a new the­mat­ic direc­tion with his newest fea­ture. The sev­en­ty-three-minute run time also con­firms a new qual­i­ty of brevi­ty to the drawn-out dead­pan asso­ci­at­ed with the auteur.

The film has yet to gain dis­tri­b­u­tion, but once notices from the fes­ti­val begin to roll in, expect plans for a release in the first half of 2020. You will know of Andersson’s return by the sud­den appear­ance of a chill in the air, and the gen­er­al feel­ing that the specter of death can­not be far off.