A woman alone in a room repeatedly writes a letter with tiny broken off pieces of pencil lead. Outside her window, vistas of ever-changing light register her every emotion.

One of the Quay Brothers’ most abstract films, In Absentia combines live-action and animation with the sinister music of Stockhausen to generate a doom-metal landscape of the mind. Fraught, haunting, yet eerily beautiful, the images move and flicker in a shifting dance of light and shadow.