Adam Dri­ver and Gre­ta Ger­wig face the apoc­a­lypse in the White Noise trailer

It’s a hun­dred-mil­lion-dol­lar project, reserved for the releas­ing studio’s late-in-the-year awards slot and fea­tur­ing two of today’s biggest-named tal­ents in the lead­ing roles. But Noah Baum­bach​‘s lat­est film White Noise, despite a star­ry cast includ­ing Adam Dri­ver and Gre­ta Ger­wig, is clos­er to an anti-block­buster than any­thing else; rather than offer­ing big-screen pop­corn excite­ment, it instead presents hyper-cere­bral thought exper­i­ments fueled by anx­i­ety, para­noia, and fear of death. The movies!

Today brings the first prop­er trail­er for White Noise, and with it a taste of Baumbach’s vibrant, sur­re­al, slav­ish­ly loy­al inter­pre­ta­tion of nov­el­ist Don DeLillo’s source prose. We’re ush­ered into a world sat­u­rat­ed by brand names and divorced from authen­tic expe­ri­ence, where gro­cery shop­ping and grad­u­ate-sem­i­nar lec­tures numb us to the howl­ing exis­ten­tial ter­ror that stares us straight in the face dai­ly — a world, as it turns out, on the brink of a high­ly con­cep­tu­al apocalypse.

Pro­fes­sor Jack Glad­ney (Adam Dri­ver), his wife Babette (Gre­ta Ger­wig), and their brood of chil­dren from an assort­ment of mar­riages (most notably includ­ing Vox Lux star Raf­fey Cas­sidy) must flee their home and way of life in the wake of a train crash that loos­es pol­lut­ing chem­i­cals into the atmos­phere, referred to as the Air­borne Tox­ic Event. As they scram­ble to what­ev­er sem­blance of safe­ty they might be able to find, real­i­ty itself starts to break down around them, the divid­ing line between ideas and real things blur­ring until it van­ish­es completely.

At the film’s Venice pre­mière, our crit­ic on the scene Han­nah Strong was strick­en by Baumbach’s refresh­ing approach to DeLillo’s eter­nal themes of post­mod­ernist dread. In her review, she wrote that “…the over­ar­ch­ing theme of White Noise – an anx­i­ety around one’s own mor­tal­i­ty and the loom­ing spec­tre of death – is famil­iar ter­ri­to­ry for Baum­bach, as is the psy­che of the mid­dle-aged mid­dle-class white pro­tag­o­nist. The suc­cess of Mar­riage Sto­ry has grant­ed him a hand­some bud­get care of Net­flix, and White Noise rep­re­sents his most ambi­tious project in both scale and providence.”

After the con­sumerist feed­ing fren­zy of the Christ­mas sea­son, Baum­bach and DeLillo’s joint med­i­ta­tion on the cor­ro­sive forces of com­mer­cial­ism will have an espe­cial­ly sharp­ened bite. As we all cher­ish our new toys and play­things accrued dur­ing this Decem­ber, let us stop a take a moment to con­sid­er whether our attach­ment to trade­marks and plas­tic has estranged us from our truest human nature, and whether we’re all head­ing for a man­made armaged­don the likes of which we can scarce­ly com­pre­hend. Hap­py hol­i­days to us all.

White Noise comes to select cin­e­mas in the US on 25 Novem­ber, then select cin­e­mas in the UK on 2 Decem­ber, and then to Net­flix world­wide on 30 December.