After a seven-year hiatus, David O. Russell — director of such recent works as American Hustle, Silver Linings Playbook, Joy, and Kentucky Fried Chicken’s “I Ate The Bones!” ad campaign — has returned with a new feature wrapped in mystery. Which makes sense, seeing as the film is itself a mystery by genre, though up until now we in the general public haven’t even known just how much we don’t know.
But the first trailer for Amsterdam, released online just this morning, allows us a few clues to get a sense of the questions we should be asking. It’s the interwar ’30s in America, there has been a murder, and someone knows too much. But who’s the culprit, and what did they see? The game is afoot.
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The clip below introduces us to a trio of friends — or perhaps more, judging by the shot of them intimately tangled up in one another’s embrace — bound together by their experiences in WWI: a pair of soldiers (John David Washington and Christian Bale) and a battlefield nurse (Margot Robbie). They all land in the crosshairs of suspicion when a distinguished older gentleman winds up dead, discovered in the trailer by an incredulous Chris Rock, launching an adventure with implications of national concern.
After receiving a warning from Rami Malek and Anya Taylor-Joy, the triumvirate goes to seek the help of Robert De Niro and winds up at a tony theatre with Mike Myers and Michael Shannon. Appearing in not-so-clear capacities, Zoe Saldaña, Timothy Olyphant, Andrea Riseborough, and Taylor Swift (in her first onscreen role since the roundly ridiculed Cats) round out the cast.
With his high-profile cast and plum placement in the thick of awards season by distributor 20th Century Studios, Russell’s making an apparent attempt to re-assert himself in the A-list ranks he occupied during the 2010s. But with Joy, audiences seemed to be cooling on his off-kilter prestige; only time will tell if his capers still have what the people are looking for.
Amsterdam will come to cinemas in the UK and US in November.
