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At its best, cosmic horror makes viewers feel as if they are tiny, powerless creatures facing something — a being, a concept, Lovecraft’s beloved non-Euclidean geometry — whose scope is so great that it is disconcertingly, disturbingly hard to grasp.

“He’s actually a very sensible guy with a slightly non-Euclidean sense of humor,” Mr. Rubenstein said.

The instrumental “Mess Mend,” by the Baltimore band Horse Lords, starts out skewed — with chords from a slightly detuned piano hitting unevenly on offbeats — and gets nuttier from there, with a tricky 7/4 meter, a guitar melody that suggests a non-Euclidean hoedown and a gradual devolution into a funky electronic drone, not to mention a final twist.

Almodóvarian geometry is hyperbolic, non-Euclidean, kinked and convoluted.

Orwell understood, however, that politics is not a scientific endeavor, but rather “a sort of sub-atomic or non-Euclidean world” where perception could prevail over substance, sometimes dangerously, and sometimes lastingly.