Friday One Sheet: ENCOUNTER
Design house B O N D's key art for Encounter (currently getting buzz on the festival circuit, before heading to cinemas and Amazon Prime in December), continues a trend I highlighted here, about this relatively recent poster trope: The Vortex.
A psychological 'road-trip' drama about a father protecting his children from a possible otherworldly threat (aliens? parasites?), very likely his own banal paranoia, the poster does visualize, explicitly, the 'lens' that Riz Ahmed's ex-marine may have reduced the world to. (See the trailer below.)
A starry field in the centre, below the title (with its backwards letters), almost resembles those 'chaos math' trajectories of large flocks of birds. The edge of dawn halos the desert landscape of the film. The lights at the bottom, police or search vehicles? Octavia Spencer's authority figure character is 'upside down,' at the top of the circle, further underscoring the main character's headspace, while him and the boys are on the run, below.
A small note. I can live with the festival laurels at the top here, and I understand that Amazon paid for this, but I am not a fan of their little delivery smile-logo on the poster. It kind of wrecks the symmetry, and the mood of the thing. It is also, jarringly at odds with the rather large "R" classification in the bottom left corner. Personally, I would prefer to see the classic micro-text of the credit block, from an aesthetics point of view.
