A new trailer has dropped for Atropia, the feature directorial debut of filmmaker and journalist Hailey Benton Gates, and it’s every bit as provocative, surreal, and darkly funny as its premise suggests.
Written and directed by Gates, and produced by Naima Abed, Emilie Georges, Luca Guadagnino, Lana Kim, and Jett Steiger, Atropia stars Alia Shawkat, Callum Turner, Zahra Alzubaidi, Tony Shawkat, Jane Levy, Tim Heidecker, Lola Kirke, and Chloë Sevigny. The film will hit theaters on Friday, December 12, with an expanded rollout planned for January 2026.
Set in a fictional country fabricated by the U.S. military, Atropia takes place in one of several hyperreal “simulation towns” used to train American soldiers before deployment. These uncanny, made-to-look-real environments, complete with extras, props, and fake insurgents, are designed to immerse soldiers in the chaos of war without ever leaving U.S. soil.
In Gates’ hands, that bizarre premise becomes the backdrop for a biting, genre-bending satire about performance, power, and illusion. The story follows an aspiring actress (played by Alia Shawkat) who works as a civilian “role player” in the training facility. When she falls for a soldier (Callum Turner) cast as an insurgent, the scripted becomes dangerously unscripted, and their real emotions begin to unravel the entire production.
From the trailer, Atropia appears to move fluidly between absurdist comedy and psychological tension. Shawkat’s natural charisma and emotional sharpness ground the film, while Turner brings a volatile intensity that blurs the line between performance and reality.
Visually, the film evokes both military training footage and behind-the-scenes documentary aesthetics, dusty desert light, handheld realism, and moments of surreal artificiality that remind viewers they’re watching a performance within a performance.
Gates, known for her work on VICE and her unflinching approach to cultural storytelling, seems poised to deliver a film that’s both visually inventive and politically pointed. The trailer teases a film that’s as interested in the machinery of war as it is in the human need to find meaning inside it.
“In the Performance of War, Who Are the Winners and Who Are the Losers?”
That tagline, drawn directly from the press materials, encapsulates what I assume is the film’s central question. As the line between training and reality begins to collapse, Atropia challenges the audience to consider how much of modern warfare, politics, and even personal identity is performance.
The satire feels especially resonant today, when simulated realities, from social media personas to AI-generated “truths,” dominate the way we interpret the world. Gates uses the military-industrial complex as both subject and metaphor, creating what looks to be a scathing yet strangely empathetic portrait of people trapped inside systems they only half understand.
Though Atropia is set within a fabricated nation, its themes are unmistakably real. The use of actors and elaborate sets to simulate war zones isn’t fiction; it’s based on actual U.S. military training programs that employ civilians to create realistic “foreign” villages. Gates takes that real-world absurdity and spins it into something both funny and possibly disturbing: a story where the performance of violence becomes indistinguishable from violence itself.
The trailer teases both the spectacle and the unease. Explosions cut to rehearsed dialogue. Soldiers break character mid-scene. A love story flickers to life between people who may not even know where their roles end. The effect is haunting, comic, and quietly profound.
As a debut feature, Atropia positions Hailey Benton Gates as a filmmaker to watch. She blends her background in investigative storytelling with the surreal playfulness of cinema, a combination that gives the film an unusually sharp point of view. Like Wag the Dog or MASH*, Atropia promises to use humor not as escape but as a lens to confront uncomfortable truths.
If the trailer is any indication, Gates isn’t just parodying military spectacle, she’s exposing the deep human need to believe in the stories we’re told, even when we know they’re false.
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