In only a few weeks’ time, Oscar Isaac will be a part of the furore surrounding what is undoubtedly the biggest film of his career to date: Star Wars: The Force Awakens. But despite a foray into blockbuster cinema with Star Wars and X-Men: Apocalypse, there’s still plenty for fans of the actor’s more character-driven performances to get excited about. Case in point: A24’s low-key drama Mojave.
Having made its bow at the Tribeca Film Festival earlier in the year, the distributor is on the verge of releasing Isaac’s drama via DirecTV very soon indeed (December 3), and we now have a new trailer for Mojave that pits the actor against his former Inside Llewyn Davis cohort, Garrett Hedlund.
Pitting the pair against one another despite their eerie similarities, Hedlund stars as Tom, a violent and reticent artist who finds himself adrift with life. Seeking nothing but his own company in the outback, he then encounters Isaac’s Jack, and what follows is a gripping tussle of brains and brawn as the pair engage in and old fashioned mano-a-mano. Walton Goggins, Mark Wahlberg and Dania Ramirez also star in Mojave, which is being pitched as an old-school thriller, and today’s certainly drives that point and then some.
A24 will debut Mojave via DirecTV first on December 3, with a theatrical release planned for the new year – January 6, 2016.
Mojave is a classical, cerebral thriller about a brilliant, near-suicidal artist, Thomas (Garrett Hedlund), who attempts to escape his privileged existence into the desert only to encounter a homicidal, chameleon-like drifter—Jack (Oscar Isaac). Their first encounter at a campfire sets up a nonstop, violent duel of physical and intellectual equals.
The game intensifies when Jack, while in murderous pursuit of Thomas, witnesses Thomas’ accidental killing of an innocent man he has mistaken for Jack. The chase moves from the spectacular vistas of the American desert to a noir Los Angeles, where Jack discovers Thomas’ notoriety as an artist and continues to remake his own identity in relentless pursuit of his victim, culminating in a vortex of criminality and brutality as Thomas emerges as an equally dangerous opponent.