Equals is set in the future, but it’s mostly just a love story, which isn’t so surprising when you look at the past work of its director, Drake Doremus. His last feature, Breathe In, found characters plagued with the idea of forbidden love, and Like Crazy saw its main players being driven, uh, crazy by the circumstances surrounding their own romance. Equals has higher stakes than the loss of love, though, and it’s made abundantly clear in this new trailer.
The film stars Kristen Stewart and Nicholas Hoult, two of the best young actors working today. She is Nia and he is Silas, and they are a part of a humanity that has been bred free of emotions like love, happiness, and whatever else (cravings for pizza?). Genetic science isn’t perfect, though, and sometimes the human need to feel perseveres, creating outlawed anomalies like Nia and Silas, who both happen to be very attractive and roughly the same age, and so obviously fall in love with one another. If the powers that be were to find out, they’d be killed.
We’ve seen footage of the film before, but nothing that so clearly paints the risks faced by our protagonists as this new trailer does. The all-white clothing, atmospheric music, whispered dialog, and cast full of good-looking people (Bel Powley, Jacki Weaver, Guy Pearce) really ramp up the anxiety and make you wonder: if Nicholas Hoult and Kristen Stewart can’t be together in this world, what’s the point?
Watch the trailer below. The film is set for a July 15 release.