Studios sold these as something they weren’t. Here’s what they actually were.
1. Nope (2022) — Sold as: a UFO thriller. Actually: a meditation on spectacle, exploitation, and who gets consumed by the entertainment industry. Every trailer emphasised the alien. The film is really about Daniel Kaluuya’s character reckoning with a family legacy of being background in other people’s stories. The alien is a metaphor wearing a spaceship.
2. The Banshees of Inisherin (2022) — Sold as: a quirky Irish comedy. Actually: one of the bleakest films about creative loneliness and male emotional repression ever made. The donkey and the fiddle in the marketing made it look like Waking Ned Devine. It is not Waking Ned Devine. Bring tissues, not a pint.
3. Beau Is Afraid (2023) — Sold as: the next Ari Aster horror film. Actually: a three-hour psychoanalytic odyssey through a son’s relationship with maternal guilt. Aster trolled his own audience. The horror-adjacent trailer attracted genre fans who were then subjected to something closer to a fever dream about Jewish mother-son dynamics. Divisive doesn’t begin to cover it.
4. Priscilla (2023) — Sold as: a Sofia Coppola Elvis companion piece. Actually: a deeply quiet film about a teenager disappearing inside someone else’s life. The posters leaned into the glam. The film is 113 minutes of incremental erasure. Less Elvis and more The Virgin Suicides with rhinestones.5. Civil War (2024) — Sold as: a political action film about America’s collapse. Actually: a film about war photography, moral detachment, and what journalists owe their subjects. The trailers made it look like Apocalypse Now set in Texas. Alex Garland made a film about the cost of bearing witness. The politics are deliberately, pointedly absent — which is itself the point.
