Besides a special engagement of Life of Pi in 3D, SIFF this week is showing the documentary Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters (at the SIFF Film Center on Seattle Center campus, through November 29), which illustrates a different kind of wizardry. If it’s not a documentary with that much heft (everyone in it is reasonably agreeable to the notion that Crewdson’s art is fine, indeed), it’s at least interesting to see someone working with the facts of the physical world, instead of pixels, primarily.

Brief Encounters mostly trails Crewdson around as he set designs his photographs–the process is similar to a movie shoot, beginning with location scouting scouting, the acquisition of permits (sometimes), casting locals, and art directing the set. But it’s all for perhaps 40 or 50 frames of the same shot. You get a little resumé of his childhood, his discovery of photography, that time he was in The Speedies, and, without much context, you also get the thoughts of authors Russell Banks and Rick Moody.

With its unquestioning gaze, the documentary comes to feel like a promotional video for Crewdson’s collection “Beneath the Roses.” Only one person dares to quibble with his visions: the shopkeeper in a small town who wants to shovel his snowy walk so no customers slip and fall. Art demands otherwise. Much time is spent in small towns, chronicling not the lives of the inhabitants so much as their evocation of Crewdson’s inner disquiet, calmed by having given the transient and unordered a frame.

A little goes a long way, when everything is a psychodrama. At its best, Crewdson’s photography can be a masterful still nature sleight-of-hand, a subversion of the tendency to privilege naturalism as real, or a surrealist glimpse of a working-poor scene. In more mundane moments, it’s an ad for Six Feet Under.

Opening November 30 at SIFF Uptown is the Irish horror film Citadel, starring Welsh actor Aneurin Barnard as a young man terrorized by agoraphobia and packs of feral children in hoodies who lurch around a tenement block like pint-sized zombies. (I guess not everyone thinks Shameless is funny.)

Writer-director Ciarán Foy is drawing upon his own experience with agoraphobia, after being randomly attacked, and these scenes–conveying a heart-pounding disorientation–are gripping. But the movie can’t decide if it’s a thriller, a social parable, or a bloody slash-fest. It’s also hampered by the fact that Barnard looks very much like a strung-out Frodo with bedhead, and by  James Cosmo’s irascible, profane priest feeling drawn from a number of graphic novels. Still, if you have a needle or hoodie phobia, this is the horror film for you.