Full of sound and fury, the first trail­er for The Tragedy of Mac­beth is here

By the tap­ping of our thumbs, some­thing stream­ing this way comes. Those of you who haven’t imme­di­ate­ly clicked out of this win­dow in a fit of jus­ti­fied, com­plete­ly under­stand­able rage can join us in tak­ing a gan­der at the first trail­er for Joel Coen​‘s hot­ly antic­i­pat­ed solo direc­to­r­i­al effort The Tragedy of Mac­beth, uploaded just this morning.

There’s a strong ​“can’t go wrong” fac­tor to this project, in which one of the most con­sis­tent­ly great film­mak­ers in today’s Hol­ly­wood enlists a pair of titan-lev­el thes­pi­ans to assay two of the meati­est roles in the his­to­ry of the Eng­lish lan­guage. For Coen’s first out­ing with­out broth­er Ethan, Den­zel Wash­ing­ton will por­tray the con­flict­ed Thane of Caw­dor, and Frances McDor­mand will push his but­tons as his pow­er-hun­gry wife.

Every­one who’s been through a mid-lev­el lit­er­a­ture class knows the text for­wards and back, mak­ing the focal point of the clip Coen’s stark, min­i­mal­ist style. Shoot­ing in high-con­trast mono­chrome, he strands his char­ac­ters in vac­u­ums of white­ness and black­ness; one shot places Mac­beth in a tight cir­cle of light sur­round­ed by dark­ness, and anoth­er sees him emerge from a fog of hazy noth­ing­ness, the lack of col­or sim­pli­fy­ing detail in the frame.

Justin Kurzel drew plau­dits in 2015 for his down-and-dirty take on the Scot­tish play, gnarly and vio­lent to an extent none before had reached. Coen’s ver­sion appears to go one step fur­ther, win­now­ing away even more until all that’s left is the per­for­mances and dia­logue in its purest form.

The film’s world pre­mière at the New York Film Fes­ti­val this Fri­day fast approach­es, and curi­ous par­ties in the UK won’t have to wait too much longer either, with a clos­ing-night slot at the BFI Lon­don Film Fes­ti­val sched­uled for 17 Octo­ber. It’s sim­ply a mat­ter of tomor­row and tomor­row, and anoth­er cou­ple dozen tomor­rows, and then we’ll all be lay­ing eyes on one of the year’s major releas­es before we know it.

The Tragedy of Mac­beth comes to US cin­e­mas on 25 Decem­ber, then streams via Apple TV on 14 Jan­u­ary, 2022.