Pedro Morelli’s Zoom—a metafiction about a comic book artist, a novelist, and a filmmaker—premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last year, and an official trailer is now here to make you say “huh?” We will break it down for you: Alison Pill stars as Emma, a comic book artist who also works in a sex doll factory because that industry is seemingly more lucrative than comics. But she escapes it all by working on a comic book about an action filmmaker named Edward, who she has constructed as her dream man. Edward (played by Gael García Bernal) is deviating from his action roots to make an arthouse film about a model named Michelle (Mariana Ximenes), who is writing a novel…about a cartoonist named Emma. Things get very Stranger Than Fiction (in fact, the trailer borrows that idiom), but kind of like Stranger Than Fiction on acid. Emma, Edward, and Michelle exist in separate realities but all have a hand in dictating each other’s.
Part-animation, part-live action, Zoom looks like a zippy and genuinely weird comedy. The trailer spirals deeper into delirium as it progresses. An elaborate drug heist might be involved? Also, Emma erases Edward’s dick? Zoom also stars Jason Priestley, Tyler Labine, Claudia Ohana, and Jennifer Irwin. It was written by Canadian screenwriter and graphic novelist Matthew Hansen, who won Best Original Screenplay at the Canadian Screen Awards this year for the reality-bending film.
Zoom is slated to release in the U.S. on September 2.