I'm not going to complain about attending the Sundance Film Festival, because that's both churlish and totally not in season (you save your complaints for early January when you're putting your schedule together!) But really, one of the difficult things about attending the world's best independent film festivals is that you catch a movie you love and then wait months or even years to see it again, if you ever get the chance at all. When great movies are picked up by great distributors at the festival it's a cause for celebration, until you find out the distributor has scheduled it for an October release, and in the meantime you've got to somehow live your life without going back and figuring out exactly what was happening with that shot in the bunker.

Tough life, I know. But this is the waiting game I've been playing since January with Take Shelter, probably the best film I saw at the festival and one that's so enigmatic and strange that I don't even think I was starting to understand it until it was halfway over. Starring Michael Shannon as a family man who's convinced the apocalypse is coming, with Tree of Life's Jessica Chastain as his beleaguered wife, Take Shelter is finally coming to theaters thanks to Sony Pictures Classics on September 30. To mark this momentous occasion, Movieline has debuted the film's poster, which you can see below.



The image combines two of the most iconic scenes in the film, one a delusion in which Shannon imagines swarms of birds flying over himself as his daughter, the other one in which the family takes refuge in the storm shelter's he's obsessively built in the backyard. If you're not intrigued by the sight of that mundane but still menacing cloud of birds, I'm not really sure what you're looking for in your movie advertising at all. Take Shelter isn't a movie for everyone-- it's slow, deliberate, and more than a little strange-- but if you're intrigued by the idea of an apocalypse movie that's not made for idiots, you've got something to look forward to this fall.