A Shape of Things to Come Gives Radical Individualism a Close-Up

Although not quite as avant-garde as one might expect from its opening and closing images, A Shape of Things to Come is a pleasant hangout movie. It begins with solarized black-and-white drone shots of the Sonoran Desert as ominous ticking fills the soundtrack. It ends with its subject, an extremely off-the-grid man who calls himself Sundog, smoking DMT extracted from toad venom. As his trip intensifies while he lies in the grass, the film abandons its representation of nature for hand-painted animation, segueing into the closing credits.   

The new documentary from directors Lisa Marie Malloy and J.P. Sniadecki is far more concerned with day-to-day experience than it is with explaining Sundog as a character. He occasionally talks to himself, but the film’s halfway over before he lays out his personal philosophy, which is exactly what you would expect: He wants to enjoy life amid nature without having to work a 9-to-5 job. The contradictions come in when one realizes how much he embodies an American brand of hyper-individualism — his stated desire to protect the environment, for instance, is impossible without collective action. With long hair and a beard (not to mention a taste for the desert’s bounty of natural drugs), Sundog looks like a hippie. But one could also picture him getting red-pilled while listening to conservative talk radio. (In a 2018 conversation with filmmaker Nicolas Pereda for the website Bomb while A Shape of Things to Come was still in production, Sniadecki notes that Sundog refers to ordinary folks as “sheeple.”) 

The film shows far more than it tells. The choice to put Leonard Bernstein’s recording of Richard Strauss’ Don Quixote on the soundtrack may be a bit of editorializing, or it may simply reflect the radio program Sundog was listening to. The scene in which he kills a javelina (a wild animal related to the pig) has angered some spectators. Simply representing the fact that Sundog needs to shoot animals for food is one thing, but it’s more questionable to include a lengthy shot of the javelina’s death throes. But the film is committed to the unsanitized details of Sundog’s life. Chloé Zhao’s award-winning Nomadland has garnered kudos for depicting elderly people struggling amid rural poverty, but A Shape of Things to Come goes a step further — showing a close-up of a naked 60-year-old man, with a body you wouldn’t see even in most indie films, defecating into a chamber pot.  

A Shape of Things to Come is a pleasant place to spend 80 minutes, but it hints at a larger vision that it never really delivers. In the aforementioned 2018 conversation with Bomb’s Pereda, co-director Sniadecki said: “It’s made with [Sundog]. We work together, and of course there are problems and conflicts, but we try to develop scenes and scenarios collaboratively.” (Sniadecki has a penchant for collective work, including his previous feature, El Mar La Mar, also made in the Sonoran Desert with co-director Joshua Bonnetta.)

The film feels less and less casual in its second half, although it never turns into a narrative or conventional documentary, as Sundog finally goes to the library and speaks to a woman there, and attends a rock concert. He even fantasizes about using a rifle to take out a border patrol surveillance tower. But all of these actions are introduced in a fairly jarring manner. Malloy and Sniadecki depict Sundog’s drug experience with a rare subtlety — especially for a substance that leads its users to say things like, It’s not a drug, it’s a light switch that flips you to another universe. Questions about America’s ideology of individualism linger through the movie, and our protagonist comes across as someone who took the country’s promises of freedom more seriously than they were intended.