The festival highlight is Quantum Cowboys tonight at 7, followed by A24 property Problemista. It’s a good thing I needed to put in an extra hour of work yesterday, because if I weren’t able to take off an hour early today, I probably wouldn’t make that curtain. Part of the reason I moved to Dallas was to be closer to the Texas Theatre – I was going out in Oak Cliff as often as I was in Denton at that point, but 40 miles and 20 miles are the same distance if you’re trying to cross them at rush hour in Dallas. If I’m going to Oak Cliff, I still need to plan out a full day to make the trip worthwhile, and unless I fully move down there, I still need a machete to make a 7 p.m. Friday night curtain.

Quantum Cowboys writer/director Geoff Marslett, a North Texas native, is onhand to explain himself before what he describes as a film unlike anything you’ve ever seen, and this is one of the rare occasions that’s an accurate description. It’s a time loop and multiverse film, the type of thing that people make a big deal out of being confusing despite being fairly easy concepts, but Marslett has a personal background in physics, and the film is based on up-to-date quantum mechanics theory.

It follows three cowboys in 1873 on the run from and then back to Yuma, Arizona, but tells the story of competing timelines, competing versions of reality, crashing into each other and vying for authority. Each timeline is animated in a different style, with the animation getting more and less abstract depending on how certain we can be about that scene existing in the authoritative timeline, memory or personal narrative – the characters are all arguing about what happened or what will happen, so in this case, those are all the same thing. The animation is all rotoscoped from actual photography, with Marslett saying he worked on every frame of the film to one degree or another.

Fittingly, the film is a lot of different things at once, both a high-minded examination of physics, memory, art and how they interact with each other, but also a dirt-cheap Western about people walking around in the desert. It’s psychedelic and dusty, completely insane and very easy to understand all at the same time.

When we switch over to Problemista, also on the main screen, I have to stop and wonder at the artifice itself. Problemista is almost comparably vibrant and insane to Quantum Cowboys – it stars Saturday Night Live writer Julio Torres, who writes, directs and co-produces, as a Salvadoran immigrant in New York City trying to hold down a job and stave off deportation. The film uses vivid fantasy sequences, imagining the immigration system as an unsolvable maze that Torres is trapped in, a hall of hourglasses counting down the time he has left to get his VISA signed and himself as a knight fighting his boss as a hydra. The neutral world of the film is just as blown-out and colorful as the explicit fantasy sequences, to the point that they blend easily together.

Slamming these two brilliant surrealist films back-to-back, each with extremely different energies, moods, anxieties and conceits, it’s overwhelming to run in the back of my mind that I’m in the same room sitting in close to the same seat looking at the same screen having these two wildly different experiences. And this theater is almost century old, so the reality of the contrasts that have taken place in that room is multiplied by, what, 100,000 at least? This specific existential crisis is a frequent part of my life, it’s just very strong in this particular moment between these particular films.

I need to pull out my machete again to get through the packed-to-the-gills Texas Theatre, which can become a massive gridlock with even a moderately sized crowd. Usually I love every second, but it’s been two packed-to-the-gills days at work and I’m exhausted. I’ll have to wait till the weekend to really get my “Fear and Loathing” on.

Quantum Cowboys is searching for sale, but it stars Lily Gladstone, who will star in Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon later this year, so Marslett is hopeful he can ride that momentum to a distribution deal. Problemista was produced by A24 and features Tilda Swinton, RZA and Isabella Rossellini, and will release Aug. 4.