Duncan Jones' Mute Gets First Trailer From Netflix

Netflix has released the first trailer for Mute, a new sci-fi mystery film from Duncan Jones, starring Alexander Skarsgård (True Blood, Big Little Lies), Paul Rudd (Ant-Man, Clueless) and Justin Theroux (The Leftovers, Mulholland Drive). Jones co-wrote the film with Michael Robert Johnson, and has called it a "spiritual sequel" to his 2009 film Moon, meaning it's set in the same universe.

Set in near-future 2052 Berlin – which looks a lot like Ridley Scott's Blade Runner – the film follows a mute bartender named Leo Beiler (Skarsgård) who's searching for his missing girlfriend Naadirah (Seyneb Saleh), and is forced to take on the city's gangsters in the process. On his journey, he comes across Cactus Bill (Rudd) and Duck Teddington (Theroux), a pair of loud, disrespectful US army surgeons who are on a mission of their own.

The two-minute trailer is high on visuals and low on actual story info, which makes sense considering Jones said he has a "love hate relationship" with trailers. "I would rather people go in to a movie knowing nothing about it, but that's a bit old fashioned," he wrote on Twitter. When a user replied saying they had "no clear idea what [Mute] was about" after watching the trailer, Jones tweeted it was "by design".

This will be the fourth film for Jones – and the first to not have a wide theatrical release – after Moon, the 2011 thriller Source Code, and the 2016 video game adaptation Warcraft. He recently revealed that he actually wrote Mute before Moon, which would have made it his first film. But after seeing Sam Rockwell's audition, he ended up writing Moon for the actor, and Mute kept getting pushed after that.

It finally ended up at Netflix, which is where Mute will be available on February 23. The film will be available in Ultra HD 4K and HDR.