You may think that if you’ve seen one time-traveling murderer sci-fi movie, you’ve seen them all — but you’d be wrong. The first trailer is out for In the Shadow of the Moon, and while the film does have some Terminator-in-reverse vibes, it still manages to look quite unlike anything we’ve seen before.
The mysterious film tells the story of a serial killer (The Last Man on Earth‘s Cleopatra Coleman) who surfaces every nine years. She always kills her victims in the same impossible manner: by liquefying their brains and leaving strange marks on the back of their necks. One cop (Boyd Holbrook) thinks he’s figured out how she’s doing it, and the trailer seems to imply that she’s a time-traveler who’s committing these murders in order to save the future (that’s where the reverse-Terminator vibes come from). See the trailer for yourself below and see if you can figure out just what’s going on.
The trailer is a lot to take in, and like we said, it’s not super-clear what exactly happening. Unfortunately (or fortunately, if you like a good mystery), the film’s official synopsis does little to clear things up:
In 1988, Philadelphia police officer Thomas Lockhart (Boyd Holbrook), hungry to become a detective, begins tracking a serial killer who mysteriously resurfaces every nine years. But when the killer’s crimes begin to defy all scientific explanation, Lock’s obsession with finding the truth threatens to destroy his career, his family, and possibly his sanity.
Whether this movie involves a time-traveling killer or just a cop slowly going insane, we’re in. In the Shadow of the Moon starts streaming on Netflix on Sept. 27.