It’s been a week of electrifyingly good trailers — and we seem to be on the brink of a boom awesome films (after particularly meagre offerings this summer.) There’ve already been two trailers this week (for Lucile Hadžihalilović’s Evolution and Jordan Peele’s Get Out) that you may find yourself wanting to watch again and again — either to guess at what the hell is actually going on in them or to simply revisit their unsettlingly intriguing aesthetics. The just-released first trailer (dubbed a “teaser”) for Jackie — the Natalie Portman-starring film from No director Pablo Larraín, about Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis — may depict a cultural moment and a tragedy with which most people are at least historically familiar, but it looks like the world and emotional terrain it displays is just as strange as the worlds of some of the eerier films that’ve caught our attention this week.
The film is about Jackie O., but follows her in the days immediately after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, grounding the narrative in her interview with LIFE Magazine (only one week following her husband’s death), and flashing back from there.
Though biopics are often dull vehicles for big Hollywood names to play imitation games (like, hey, The Imitation Game), Jackie has received high praise both for Portman and for the the film itself, and Larraín’s refreshing take on the genre.
Reviewing the film for Variety , Guy Lodge wrote, ��Eschewing standard biopic form at every turn, this brilliantly constructed, diamond-hard character study observes the exhausted, conflicted Jackie as she attempts to disentangle her own perspective, her own legacy, and, perhaps hardest of all, her own grief from a tragedy shared by millions.” And Flavorwire’s own Jason Bailey said that the film is “surprisingly experimental and experiential, walking us through those most private moments, and daring us to imagine their intensity.”
The trailer depicts something as universally familiar as grief, paired with the surreal and singular experience of having that grief be the focus of the entire American population.
Watch the trailer:
The film will be released on December 2.
[Via Indiewire]