Watch Zen­daya and John David Wash­ing­ton in the Mal­colm & Marie trailer

Up to this point, Sam Levin­son has seemed to belong to that recent class of accom­plished TV showrun­ners unable to sur­vive in the hos­tile envi­ron­ment of the movies. (See also: Noah Haw­ley, Sam Esmail, Dan Fogel­man.) His big-screen debut Assas­si­na­tion Nation fiz­zled after its record-set­ting buy at Sun­dance, but with the suc­cess of HBO’s Eupho­ria now bol­ster­ing him, he’s mak­ing anoth­er go at con­quer­ing the cinema.

The first trail­er for his upcom­ing film Mal­colm & Marie appeared online today, in advance of its release on Net­flix next month. Filmed dur­ing quar­an­tine with a cast con­sist­ing only of Zen­daya and John David Wash­ing­ton, the trail­er fea­tures lots of what you’d expect from a min­i­mal­ist project assem­bled on the fly: a cou­ple peo­ple, a few rooms, and lots of talking.

It’s the big pre­mière night for the buzzy new movie by film­mak­er Mal­colm (Wash­ing­ton), and as with so many men antic­i­pat­ing a rush of new fame, he decides it’s a good time to reex­am­ine his rela­tion­ship with his girl­friend (Zen­daya). Over the course of one long night, they unpack all their per­son­al bag­gage and strew their con­tents all around the sleek, ultra-mod­ern home they share. It also appears that Marie will make mac­a­roni and cheese in one scene.

Cel­lu­loid fetishists offend­ed by Mank​‘s unnat­ur­al fusion of film­strip aes­thet­ics to dig­i­tal pho­tog­ra­phy will be relieved to find that the grain of Levinson’s lat­est is organ­ic, com­ing from good ol’-fashioned 35mm shoot­ing. He’s clear­ly going for a stripped-down, inti­mate feel in depar­ture from the whoosh­ing-cam­era the­atrics of his ear­li­er work, a change that just might be the shot in the arm he needs.

But it’s always a dan­ger­ous propo­si­tion when a film­mak­er sav­aged by crit­ics decides to make a movie about some­one with his same pro­fes­sion, the temp­ta­tion to air pet­ty griev­ances hav­ing proven too great for so many in the past. Here’s hop­ing that even though ​“this isn’t a love sto­ry,” as the trail­er informs us, it’s not an axe-grind­ing sto­ry either.

Mal­colm & Marie comes to Net­flix in the UK and US on 5 February.