What about this last episode on the way home?

Maybe I should be waiting a few more weeks until Tom Cruise has left our fair city to post what is clearly mainstream Hollywood’s first, albeit esoteric, shot across Xenu’s bough of Scientology but, frankly I can’t wait any longer. It’s P.T. Anderson. It’s Jonny Greenwood. The sure-fire director behind There Will Be Blood and Magnolia and the experimental Radiohead guitarist. And it’s Joaquin Phoenix—back from the dead.

It’s the teaser trailer The Atlantic hilariously said “confuses and intrigues.” It’s our first look at Anderson’s The Master, set to a nervy, plucking score by Greenwood. Set in the 1950s, Phoenix stars as a drifting military vet taken in by Philip Seymour Hoffman playing a charismatic, possibly science fiction obsessed, radical who launches his own religious movement. Sound familiar? Reports suggest Anderson screened an early cut of the film for Cruise, his friend and star of Magnolia, and that Cruise “had issues” with parts of the film.

Curiously, this first look focuses only on Phoenix, keeping Hoffman’s character a surprise. But by doing so, Anderson ratchets up the tension, quickly constructing the dense architecture of Phoenix’s obviously troubled mind; a mind like easy prey for a cult movement.

The Master arrives this October. View the trailer below: