Janelle Monae Forced Into Slavery In Time-Traveling Thriller Film ‘Antebellum’
The first full-length trailer for the upcoming time-traveling thriller film ‘Antebellum’, starring Janelle Monáe, dropped this week.
Monáe plays Vanessa, a successful author who finds herself trapped in a horrifying reality who must uncover a mind-bending mystery before it’s too late. Eric Lange, Jena Malone, Kiersey Clemons, Jack Houston, Tongayi Chirisa, Robert Aramayo, Gabourey Sidibe, Lily Cowles, and Marque Richardson also star.
Details of the plot are minimal, but the teaser jumps the present day, seemingly to the 19th century before the Civil War.
Off the top, there’s lush and tranquil music and visuals of a young girl skipping along a gorgeous yard of a country estate, as the words: ‘There are precious things that can never be lost’ flash across the screen.
There are then images of Monáe’s character kissing a young girl on the cheek and various images of family and nature, including ocean waves, flowers blooming, and butThe music abruptly ends and the screen fades to black as the sentence, ‘There are precious things that can never be lost’ is finished with: ‘unless you are chosen.’
At this point the tranquility is replaced with startling and horrifying music over a scene showing a hand over Monáe’s mouth, indicating she’s been kidnapped in modern-day and sent back in time as a slave on a plantation field.
From there, the teaser flip-flops between images of Monáe’s Vanessa in the present day and her as a slave trying to get back to her time, while the sounds of a clock ticking are heard in the background.
The words ‘take back your life’ scroll across the screen, one at a time, in the final moments of the trailer.
It turns out Monáe was conflicted about whether to do the film due to the content, but in the end she decided that the content is part of a conversation we need to have as a society.
‘I knew that taking on this role was going to take a lot of deep diving emotionally,” the actress-singer, 34, told Vanity Fair.
‘This role is the hardest role that I’ve done because it directly connects the past, the present, and the future.’
The film, which was written and directed by the duo of Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz, who helmed Jay-Z’s music video Kill Jay-Z, was originally scheduled to be released in April but that was scrapped due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
‘Antebellum’ is currently slated to open in theaters on August 21. For more info, click here. Watch the trailer below:
Janelle Monae: Photo by David Fisher/Shutterstock
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