When viewed from a certain angle, our modern waking life is more than enough to overwhelm anyone. Loud, mindless, misguided, and mostly meaningless, existence is by and large so numbingly banal that it’s easy to miss those shoals of bliss fate stashes here and there, like Fabergé Easter eggs. “and we will never leave you” is one of these: a muted see-saw fueled by ghosts, curtains stirred by a spectral breeze, the mile marker just prior to a vanishing point.
In cinema and fiction species, we’ve become accustomed to the crystal ball or scrying pool that, in mystically-attuned hands, gives birth to HD-clear portents or present-tense visions. For a few seconds, colorful smoke swirls furiously before parting to reveal something that will advance the plot or telegraph plot points to come. But what if that smoke didn’t have anything important to communicate to us? What if it just spun and hummed, staring us down with such mellow élan that it didn’t even matter where that 30 minutes went?