The first trailer for John Woo’s Silent Night, the next violence-filled Christmas thriller, is here, and it has a silent Joel Kinnaman on a rampage.
The trailer debuted on EW today (and you can watch it below), offering the first glimpse at Woo’s first Hollywood film in 20 years - and it has essentially no dialogue. Woo, the action icon behind A Better Tomorrow, Red Cliff, The Killer, Face/Off, and Mission: Impossible 2, told EW in an accompanying interview that the challenge was “how do you make the audience accept a story without dialogue, and get them moved by the story?”
The first trailer for John Woo’s ‘SILENT NIGHT’ has been released.
— DiscussingFilm (@DiscussingFilm) October 2, 2023
In theaters on December 1. pic.twitter.com/wS7xXkufFe
As seen in the trailer, Kinnaman’s character gets shot in the throat, leaving him unable to speak. He embarks on a quest for revenge after the death of his young son – and, if that sounds a little like John Wick, that shouldn’t be too much of a surprise. Basil Iwanyk, who’s overseen the entire John Wick series as a producer, is a producer on Silent Night as well.
Speaking in an interview with Vulture back in July, Woo said the lack of dialogue in Silent Night allowed him “to use visuals to tell the story, to tell how the character feels.”
“We are using music instead of language,” he added. “And the movie is all about sight and sound. The budget was a little tight, and the schedule was tight, but it made me change my working style.
The trailer also leans into the Christmas of it all, with the tradition of unabashedly violent holiday movies alive and well. Appropriately, Silent Night will hit theaters on Dec. 1.
Alex Stedman is a Senior News Editor with IGN, overseeing entertainment reporting. When she's not writing or editing, you can find her reading fantasy novels or playing Dungeons & Dragons.
