Dark Places Trailer: Charlize Theron Digs Up A Deadly Mystery

After all the critical acclaim and Oscar attention that came with Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn is ready to take us to some dark places. The new Dark Places trailer brings to life the author’s bestselling novel about a woman looking for the person responsible for slaughtering her family. It’s eery, it’s intense, and you can watch it below.

While Rosamund Pike and Ben Affleck gave incredible, mind-manipulating performances in Gone Girl, Charlize Theron and Nicholas Hoult attempt to do the same with Dark Places. As the trailer depicts, Libby Day (Theron) was only 7 years old when her mother and two sisters were murdered. She fled her farmhouse into the cold January weather, losing toes and fingers in the process but ultimately surviving. The tragic event was called "The Satan Sacrifice of Kinnakee, Kansas," and Libby testified that her brother, Ben (Corey Stoll), was the killer, given all the dark and goth paraphernalia littering his room. 25-years later, Libby is contacted by a group called The Kill Club, an organization of people obsessed with discovering the truth behind the most notorious crimes. They don’t believe Ben is guilty, and with help from Libby, they hope to discover the truth about what happened.

Much like with Gone Girl, the structure of Dark Places flashes between the past and present, slowly revealing exactly what went down that fateful night. And considering it’s Flynn who wrote the source material, there’s bound to be something we’re just not seeing. In addition to Theron, Holt, and Stoll, the film features Mad Men’s Christina Hendricks, Kick-Ass’s Chloe Grace Moretz, and X-Men: Apocalypse’s Tye Sheridan. French director Gilles Paquet-Brenner is at the helm this time, and he also wrote the screenplay for the adaptation.

Theron is coming off of an incredible performance in Mad Max: Fury Road, a film that was hailed for its pro-feminist portrayals of women and their fight to survive. For Dark Places, however, the actress is pulling from a far more personal place. She told the French TV network TF1 that she’s using her own traumatic childhood experience as inspiration; when she was 15, her father attacked her mother who in turn shot him to death in self-defense. No charges were filed. It took a long time for that moment to sink in and, as she says, she carries the emotional scar with her, but she doesn’t let it define who she is.

Dark Places hits theaters beginning on August 7. Considering Gone Girl earned a lot of attention in the awards race, could this mark another nomination and, perhaps, a win for Theron? The actress won Best Actress for Monster in 2004, and the Dark Places trailer does well to preview her new, emotionally charged performance.