Watch Jeffrey Dean Morgan Hunt Immigrants in Intense New 'Desierto' Trailer

With border control one of the hot points of this year’s presidential election, Desierto is a very topical movie. Produced by Alfonso Cuaron and directed by his son Jonas Cuaron, the thriller stars Gael Garcia Bernal as a man attempting to illegally cross into the United States only to be hunted relentlessly by Jeffrey Dean Morgan. For some viewers, Morgan’s character might be seen as the hero, but for the Cuarons, who previously collaborated on the script for Gravity, he’s definitely the villain. A terrifying one at that. 

One critic blurbed in the new trailer below even says he’s “one of the most horrifying villains of recent cinema.” Desierto premiered this month at the Toronto International Film Festival and received mixed reviews, but those that are positive show an excitement for the film and its conventional but well-crafted genre trappings that make you easily ignore the negatives. One of the other blurbs tells us that if we look at it as a horror film, it’s a “masterpiece.”

Watch the new trailer below. 

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Movies like this don’t need to be original. They just need to thrill us. Desierto, which is co-written by Mateo Garcia and also stars Alondra Hidalgo, looks like it belongs to a long tradition of movies, many of them inspired by Richard Connell’s short story The Most Dangerous Game. A lot of these stories, though, are purely about the intensity of the cat and mouse plot, while occasionally there’s a deeper social or political theme, as in Wolf Creek and now this.

It’s not surprising that Jonas Cuaron would revolve the story around an issue. One of his first films, also made with his father, is a short animated documentary based on Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine. The Cuarons’ country of Mexico also seems to be on board with the message, as Desierto has been selected to be its official submission for consideration for the Best Foreign Language Oscar category. The movie already won a special critics’ prize at Toronto.

Catch Desierto in theaters on October 14.

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