I wrote a piece last December about the MPAA granted an R-rating to the David Schwimmer-directed drama Trust, which involved a teenage girl attacked by a predator she met online. The US distribution company, Millennium Entertainment, appealed the rating arguing that kids should see the film because it was a cautionary tale. I responded that the film, based on the international trailer and the poster, seemed to be a piece of exploitation that took an unlikely situation and tried to pass it off as a 'this WILL happen to you' fable. Alas, I did not realize that Millennium Films (the international distributor) and Millennium Entertainment (the US distributor) were two different companies, so basically I was faulting one distribution company for the sensationalist marketing campaign of another. Anyway, now that the US theatrical trailer has been released, I can say that I genuinely owe Millennium Entertainment an apology.
The trailer is refreshingly low-key, coming off not as a thriller involving a vengeful father versus a child-raping super-villain who won't stop, but as a family drama that deals with one family's reaction to a specific situation. The trailer doesn't try to sell the idea that young girls being attacked by online predators is an everyday menace (it's not...). It merely purports to tell one story of one specific family (Clive Owen, Catherine Keener, and Liana Liberato) as they attempt to recover from a specific traumatic incident. It doesn't mean that the film is necessarily any good, but it does mean that the film is at least resisting the urge to sensationalize and thus over-dramatize its subject matter for the sake of creating an aura of 'relevance'. The film will be released on April 1st.
Scott Mendelson
The trailer is refreshingly low-key, coming off not as a thriller involving a vengeful father versus a child-raping super-villain who won't stop, but as a family drama that deals with one family's reaction to a specific situation. The trailer doesn't try to sell the idea that young girls being attacked by online predators is an everyday menace (it's not...). It merely purports to tell one story of one specific family (Clive Owen, Catherine Keener, and Liana Liberato) as they attempt to recover from a specific traumatic incident. It doesn't mean that the film is necessarily any good, but it does mean that the film is at least resisting the urge to sensationalize and thus over-dramatize its subject matter for the sake of creating an aura of 'relevance'. The film will be released on April 1st.
Scott Mendelson
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