Screen Rant

Widows Trailer: Viola Davis Has a Crime to Carry Out

By Sandy Schaefer

Published Jun 4, 2018

Viola Davis assembles a team for a heist in the trailer for 12 Years a Slave director Steve McQueen's crime drama/thriller Widows.

Ocean's 8 isn't the only 2018 movie about a group of women carrying out an elaborate crime, as the trailer for Widows is here to remind everyone. Filmmaker Steve McQueen became attached to write and direct Widows back in 2014, on the heels of his Best Picture Oscar win for the historical drama 12 Years a Slave. After teaming up with Gone Girl writer Gillian Flynn on the movie's screenplay, McQueen began filming Widows with a cast led by Oscar winner Viola Davis, Fast & Furious' Michelle Rodriguez, Elizabeth Debicki (The Cloverfield Paradox), and Cynthia Erivo (Mr Selfridge).

Davis stars in Widows as Veronica, a woman who decides to carry out her recently deceased husband's (Liam Neeson) unfinished "big score" with help from her fellow widows Alice (Debicki), Linda (Rodriguez), and Belle (Erivo). McQueen's film is based on the 1983 Widows TV mini-series created by Lynda La Plante, but trades in the show's original UK setting for modern Chicago. It also boasts a cast that's rich in character actor talent, with Daniel Kaluuya, Colin Ferrell, Jon Bernthal, André Holland, Carrie Coon, Robert Duvall, Jackie Weaver, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, and Brian Tyree Henry all playing supporting roles.

Widows promises to be decidedly different than McQueen's high art explorations of pain and suffering in his first three feature films (Hunger, Shame, 12 Years a Slave), based on its premise and genre alone. Its combination of decorated behind the scenes talent and cast further suggests that Widows could be the director's most commercially viable movie to date, in addition to a potential contender in this year's awards season race. For related reasons, Fox is getting the marketing for Widows underway now, via the release of the first trailer. Take a look in the space above.

The Widows trailer offers a nice and clean breakdown of the film's narrative, showing how the eponymous women's husbands are killed during a crime gone wrong and leave it to their loved ones to pick up the pieces. Veronica and the other widows don't just turn to a life of crime idly either; as the trailer reveals, the four women find themselves between a rock and a hard place when their deceased husbands' debts come back to haunt them after their deaths. As such, they decide to take the law into their own hands and makes things square with their husbands' criminal employees, once and for all.

Based on the trailer, Widows combines Flynn's pulp storytelling style with McQueen's precise direction and Sean Bobbitt's striking, yet gritty, visuals to produce a mature drama/thriller that promises to be equal parts compelling and exhilarating. It's a pretty intense preview overall and only further raises expectations for the film, ahead of its release in theaters this fall. Plus, as indicated earlier, it's hard to imagine that any movie with a cast as diverse and overflowing with star-power as Widows can go too wrong, at the end of the day.