Richard Lin­klater returns (with Cate Blanchett in tow!) in a new trailer

For his lat­est fea­ture, good ol’ Tex­an boy Richard Lin­klater will take leave of the Lone Star State and blaze a path north­wards. He’ll first head to the Pacif­ic North­west, which sets the scene for the upcom­ing Where’d You Go, Bernadette, and then onward to Antarctica.

That’s the jour­ney under­tak­en by the title char­ac­ter, a once-great archi­tect reduced to a most­ly house­bound life as a full-time wife and moth­er. In the new­ly released trail­er, Cate Blanchett plays her with a spiky wit that sets her apart from the squares (such as Kris­ten Wiig, her mom­my neme­sis) par­ent­ing the oth­er kids at the school attend­ed by daugh­ter Bee (Emma Nelson).

She loves Bee and her hus­band Elgin (Bil­ly Crudup), but can’t take much more of her provin­cial day-to-day, so she slips out a bath­room win­dow on an oth­er­wise ordi­nary after­noon. The 2012 nov­el form­ing the basis of this film focus­es on her family’s efforts to track her down, which lead them to the ici­est reach­es of the globe.

It’s a odd sto­ry, with one foot in com­e­dy and the oth­er in exis­ten­tial dra­ma. The trail­er plays it as a feath­er-light adven­ture with sprin­klings of humor at every turn, but the book placed a greater focus on Bernadette’s feel­ing of being trapped in her own life and requir­ing an escape.

But if any­one can man­age that bal­ance of tones, it’s Blanchett. It wasn’t so long ago that she mar­ried dry lev­i­ty with mid­dle-aged female cri­sis in Blue Jas­mine, the film for which she won her last Oscar. Nobody reck­ons with the inti­mate hor­ror of approach­ing your fifti­eth birth­day quite like her!

Where’d You Go, Bernadette comes to the­aters in the US on 16 August. A date for the UK has yet to be set.