A trailer has been unveiled for The Liberation, a dramatic cult thriller (formerly known as Harmonia) from writer/director Guy Nattiv (Golda, Skin) starring Carrie Coon (The Gilded Age, The White Lotus). Bleecker Street released the trailer ahead of the film’s limited Oscar-qualifying run in New York and Los Angeles, which starts this Friday. A wider theatrical release is planned for January 8, 2027. You can watch the trailer in the embed above.
Coon stars as Rita, a 1980s New Jersey housewife and Holocaust survivor haunted by the weight of her past. She encounters a magnetic spiritual leader (Lily James, Pam & Tommy, Cinderella) and leaves her family to follow her to an all-female commune. When her daughters, played by Bella Ramsey (The Last of Us) and Odessa Young (The Staircase), 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.
The cast also includes Tracy Letts, Coon’s real-life husband, as Rita’s husband.
The Personal Story Behind The Liberation
Nattiv drew inspiration from his own family history when developing The Liberation. As he explained at Deadline’s Contenders London event, he was eight years old when his family took him to seminars involving his grandmother. He later learned that she had joined a cult and left her husband and family.
Years later, Nattiv visited the group in an effort to understand what had happened. Rather than approaching the story without sympathy for those involved, he said he came to it with empathy, recognizing that the group had attempted to help his grandmother deal with the trauma she carried as 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.”
That personal connection gives The Liberation a more complicated foundation than the average thriller about a cult.
Carrie Coon’s The Liberation Has Award-Season Buzz
Coon’s performance has been generating award season attention since the film’s world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival.
Nattiv previously directed the Academy Award-winning short film Skin and the biographical drama Golda. With The Liberation, he turns a story rooted in his own family history into a dramatic thriller about belief, trauma, and the boundaries between personal freedom and family responsibility. Does this movie sound interesting to you? Take a look at the trailer, then let us know by leaving a comment below.
Read the original article here