Kris­ten Stew­art enters the briny deep in the Under­wa­ter trailer

Ear­li­er today, a col­league offered me a plau­si­ble expla­na­tion for the great Kris­ten Stew­art​‘s pres­ence in the glo­ri­fied B‑movie Under­wa­ter: Juli­ette Binoche did Godzil­la so that she’d have a more innate under­stand­ing of the block­buster world for Clouds of Sils Maria, and so per­haps K‑Stew took this gig for the same rea­son. (Nev­er mind that the time­line doesn’t add up, even though this footage been sit­ting on the shelf since 2017.)

But today, every­body can take a gan­der at the first trail­er for Under­wa­ter and see Stew­art doing her darnedest to mesh with her stu­dio-tent­pole envi­ron­ment. She gets to do things that the usu­al Assayas joint doesn’t allow, like yelling about pres­sure gauges and look­ing ter­ri­fied of mon­sters, as opposed to look­ing ter­ri­fied of cyber­bul­ly­ing con­cep­tu­al ghosts.

Stew­art plays Norah Price, the no-non­sense head hon­cho at an elite research facil­i­ty sub­merged beneath sev­en miles of ocean. She and her crew mem­bers (includ­ing Vin­cent Cas­sel, John Gal­lagher Jr., and a pre-can­cel­la­tion TJ Miller) fall into extreme per­il when an earth­quake of mys­te­ri­ous ori­gin rup­tures their hull, and to make mat­ters worse, they’re being stalked by some­thing of equal­ly mys­te­ri­ous origin.

The trail­er sug­gests a fusion of against-the-ele­ments sur­vival dra­ma and hor­ror in an unlike­ly locale, as the sur­vivors scram­ble to fig­ure out what’s try­ing to kill them — before they burn through their rapid­ly deplet­ing oxy­gen sup­ply, that is. It’s a night­mare in claus­tro­pho­bi­cal­ly tight quar­ters, but Norah Price has the close-cropped hair­cut to emerge in one piece. (A coif­fure that Stew­art will sport again in the upcom­ing Charlie’s Angels remake and Jean Seberg biopic.)

Between a release date in the hin­ter­lands of Jan­u­ary, the pres­ence of the now-con­tro­ver­sial Miller, and the all-around chintzi­ness of the trail­er, hopes may not be par­tic­u­lar­ly high. But that has nev­er stopped Kris­ten Stew­art fans, and that won’t change any time soon. The faith is kept.

Under­wa­ter comes to cin­e­mas in the UK and US on 10 Jan­u­ary, 2020.