While working in the desert on one of his films, French auteur Bruno Dumont (much, perhaps, like Liv Ullman in Ingmar Bergman's Persona) “suddenly became afraid, and stayed that way.” According to the director, the sudden manifestation of this existential horror was the impetus for 2003's Twentynine Palms, a riveting, allegorical, terrifyingly unclassifiable foray into the Mojave, and into the sun-drenched, pitch-black center of Yeats’ The Second Coming.