What a day to be a Sophie Turner fan, eh? This afternoon, we got our first look at the Game Of Thrones star as Lara Croft in Amazon’s upcoming Tomb Raider series on Prime Video. And now, this evening has brought with it our first look at Turner’s big reunion with fellow GOT alum and former onscreen brother Kit Harington in The Dreadful, a medieval Gothic horror joint from writer-director Natasha Kermani with roots in J-Horror classic Onibaba. Suffice it to say, the duo’s roles here stand in *ahem* Stark contrast to their last screen pairing. Check out the eerie first trailer for Kermani’s movie below;
The latest in a recent years’ resurgence of rural British horror (see also: Starve Acre, Men, The Feast), The Dreadful sees Turner star as Anne, whose relationship with her possessive mother-in-law (Marcia Gay Harden) complicates when her husband fails to return home from war, and she begins to grow close to Jago (Harington), the friend who returns home in his stead. Throw in ominous talk of a curse, some unexpected throat-slitting, and Turner and Harington getting all flirty and furtive while showing off their finest Cornish (at least we think they’re Cornish) accents, and you’ve got yourself a whole bunch of strange happenings on multiple levels that warrant closer inspection.
The official synopsis for the movie reads as follows: “Set in medieval England, Anne and her domineering mother-in-law Morwen struggle to survive on the outskirts of society. But when a man from Anne’s past returns from war, a curse begins to take shape through a mysterious knight and threatens to destroy them all.”
If you’ve seen Onibaba, you may have a pretty good guess as to what’s potentially afoot here — and if you haven’t, then maybe save Onibaba as the Japanese horror masterpiece chaser to this straight-to-streaming (and limited theatrical release) shot. Either way, we’ll see if The Dreadful by name is the dreadful by nature in a good or a bad way when it hits our screens on 20 February.