Estonia's MUSHROOMING Trailer Starts Calm, Gets Weird Quick

Watching a passel of trailers for the upcoming Toronto International Film Festival reminded me of how difficult it is to convey properly the intended tone of a movie, but the trailer for Toomas Hussar's Mushrooming makes great use of music to establish itself as a dark comedy in a very brief time.

Granted, I then had to read the TIFF program notes to know what, exactly, is going on. The trailer begins with a nice-looking middle-aged couple heading into the woods to go mushrooming. They pick up a hitchiking musician along the way, and then things quickly start to get weird. It turns out that the husband is a politician, the musician is some kind of rock idol, and when night falls, it gets very, very dark in those woods ...

Mushrooming is the directorial debut of Toomas Hussar, who also wrote the screenplay; he has years of experience as an actor under his belt. The film stars Raivo E. Tamm, Elina Reinold, Juhan Ulfsak, Üllar Saaremäe, and Hendrik Toompere Jr.

The effectiveness of the trailer is greatly enhanced by the music, which begins with cocktail-hour jazz before morphing into something else entirely.