Alia Shawkat & Callum Turner Go to (Fake) War in ‘Atropia’ Film Trailer

“We’re helping a group of teenagers to invade our homeland… in a gentler way.” Vertical has revealed the first official trailer for an indie film creation titled Atropia, marking the feature directorial debut of young filmmaker Hailey Benton Gates (aka just Hailey Gates). This premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, where it won the Grand Jury Prize in the US Dramatic Competition – although pretty much everyone thought it was a very strange win, as the film is not very good. When an aspiring actress working in a military role-playing facility falls in love with a soldier cast as an insurgent, their unsimulated emotions threaten to derail the performance. The film takes place within a fabricated fake nation created by the U.S. military to train soldiers before their deployment to the Middle East – it’s called Atropia. The story is all over the place and doesn’t come together in any coherent way. Atropia stars Alia Shawkat, Callum Turner, Zahra Alzubaidi, Tony Shawkat, Jane Levy, Tim Heidecker, Lola Kirke, & Chloe Sevigny. I wish it was a better film so I could recommend it – but unfortunately this one is destined to be forgotten quickly. // Continue Reading ›