‘The Loneliest Planet’ with Gael Garcia Bernal Gets a Creepy Trailer

After playing festivals to a strong response last year, 'The Loneliest Planet' is coming our way and the first official trailer has been released.

The film, from writer/director Julia Loktev, follows a couple (Gael Garcia Bernal and Hani Furstenberg) who go backpacking in the Caucasus Mountains of Georgia (as in the country south of Russia, not the state south of the Carolinas) shortly before they are due to get married. Things seem to start off fine as they hire a local guide to take them through the beautiful landscape, but sure enough -- otherwise we wouldn't have a movie -- an "incident" occurs that changes the nature of their journey and their very relationship.

We don't know what that incident is, but the trailer does a good job of selling the pair's descent from carefree fun into paranoia into what could be mortal terror. Loktev (who was born in Russia) creates a palpable sense of dread throughout, which is usually what we ourselves feel whenever someone wants to pry us from our living room chair to walk up and down the Santa Monica Mountains.

Collider rather confusingly gives some background on the story, saying that it was loosely inspired by a 1936 short story by Ernest Hemingway that was itself based on a true incident; the actual events also inspired a story by another author as well as a 1947 film called 'The Macomber Affair.' Whatever it's based on, it looks creepy enough for us to want to check it out when it arrives on October 26th. Read the official synopsis and check out the trailer below, and see if you agree.

Alex (Gael Garcia Bernal) and Nica (Hani Furstenberg) are young, in love and engaged to be married. The summer before their wedding, they are backpacking in the Caucasus Mountains in Georgia. The couple hire a local guide to lead them on a camping trek, and the three set off into a stunning wilderness, a landscape that is both overwhelmingly open and frighteningly closed. Walking for hours, they trade anecdotes, play games to pass the time of moving through space. And then, a momentary misstep, a gesture that takes only two or three seconds, a gesture that’s over almost as soon as it begins. But once it is done, it can’t be undone. Once it is done, it threatens to undo everything the couple believed about each other and about themselves.