Tweet Although not quite as avant-garde as one might expect from its opening and closing images, A Shape of Things to Come is a pleasant hangout movie. It begins with solarized black-and-white drone shots of the Sonoran Desert as ominous ticking fills the soundtrack. It ends with its subject, an extremely off-the-grid man who calls himself Sundog, smoking DMT extracted from toad venom. As his trip intensifies while he lies in the grass, the film abandons its representation of nature for hand-painted animation, segueing into the closing credits.  The new documentary from directors Lisa Marie Malloy and J.P. Sniadecki is far more concerned with day-to-day experience than it is with explaining Sundog as a character. He occasionally talks to himself, but the filmâs halfway over before he lays out his personal philosophy, which is exactly what you would expect: He wants to enjoy life amid nature without having to work a 9-to-5 job. The contradictions come in when one realizes how much he embodies an American brand of hyper-individualism â his stated desire to protect the environment, for instance, is impossible without collective action. With long hair and a beard (not to mention a taste for the desertâs bounty of natural drugs), Sundog looks like a hippie. But one could also picture him getting red-pilled while listening to conservative talk radio. (In a 2018 conversation with filmmaker Nicolas Pereda for the website Bomb while