‘The Liberation’ Trailer: Carrie Coon Stars In Guy Nattiv’s Complex Cult Thriller

Bleecker Street on Monday released the first trailer from The Liberation, the dramatic thriller written and directed by Guy Nattiv and starring Carrie Coon in a role that has been garnering award-season buzz since the pic’s world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival.

Coon (The Gilded Age, The White Lotus) plays Rita, a 1980s New Jersey housewife and Holocaust survivor haunted by the weight of her past. She encounters a magnetic spiritual leader (Lily James) and leaves her family to follow her to an all-female commune. When her daughters (played by Bella Ramsey and Odessa Young) arrive to rescue her and become drawn into the group’s world, Rita is forced to choose between the family she left behind and the life she believes can save her. Tracy Letts plays Rita’s husband.

Bleecker Street is setting up a short Oscar-qualifying theatrical run for The Liberation starting Friday in New York and Los Angeles. It is set up for a wider release January 8.

At Deadline’s Contenders London, Nattiv recounted the inspiration for the movie came from his own life, when as a boy his family took him to visit his grandmother.

“I was only 8 when my family took me to seminars to see my grandmother and participate with her in those meetings,” he said, later learning it was a cult and that his grandmother had “left his grandfather, left our family.”

Much later, he visited the cult with his camera to seek more answers, saying he entered the process with “a lot of empathy” and found that the cult “tried to free” his grandmother from her trauma of being a Holocaust survivor. “She had the courage to do something very uncommon: To leave your family, say goodbye to your daughters and your husband and go into the unknown and try to save yourself,” he said.

Watch the trailer above.