I admit, I have no idea what’s going on with this teaser for The Show. But all I really need to know is that it springs from the mind of comics legend and Watchmen creator Alan Moore. His tastes have always skewered towards the bizarre and twisted, and you can get a sense of that even in this brief amount of footage.
The film stars The Souvenir breakout Tom Burke, Siobhan Hewlett, Ellie Bamber, Darrell D’Silva, Richard Dillane, Christopher Fairbank, Sheila Atim, and Moore himself rocking a moon-shaped dome and silver face paint. Weird. Here’s the synopsis, which can describe what’s up better than I could:
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.
Behind the camera is longtime Moore collaborator Mitch Jenkins, the two previously working together on 2014’s anthology Show Pieces.
Moore famously despises adaptations of his comics, such as V for Vendetta and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but this is one movie he’ll obviously be supporting.
The Show has yet to gain a release date, and judging by the look of it will probably be for Moore die-hards to seek out.
