Fugue (2024)

Fugue opens into the California haze, a place richly beautiful yet filled with a haunting uneasiness. An ominous painterly pastoral awakens to a duvet of fog and grazing livestock. The film’s imagery oscillates between landscapes and abstracted visions of those spaces — waves bathe rocky shorelines, light refracts into constellations, an arresting blood-red bodily web supersedes the pictorial, beams peek through the looming forest line. The film is further enriched by its symbiosis with its soundtrack by sound artist Eric Eckhart. The film is an invocation of the sublime with its enveloping elemental beauty and the arcane dread that this beauty harbors. Encountering this film feels like encountering a deep part of oneself. A longing for the sun. - Liza Pittard