Elizabeth Banks descends into AI doppelganger hell in Alex Prager's trippy new DreamQuil trailer

Even if you ignore things like the film’s near-future setting having unbreathable air (or the outright violence that winds up breaking out between the two Carols), there’s a sense of surreal dread hanging over the whole thing, as Banks bounces between the human despair of the real Carol and the icy chipperness of her AI copy. All of which is suffused with the kind of sense of humor that refers to having an AI copy of your brain made as “digital ayahuasca,” while Reilly’s affable dope responds to Banks’ worry that the robot is eavesdropping on them with a blithe, “Isn’t everything listening to us?”

The result looks partly like a 1950s-styled Black Mirror, and partly like a cartoon-colored panic attack hitting on a whole grab bag of modern insecurities; whether Prager’s film can manage those disparate images and ideas down into something coherent is a question for when the movie actually arrives some time later this year. (Reviewers who caught is premiere at SXSW this year were impressed by the visuals more than the script.) But for now, the trailer makes for a hell of an unsettling, trippy sales pitch.