Director Fernando Meirelles‘s career is taking a quick and dumbfounding fall. After giving us arguably one of the greatest films of the modern era, City of God, and a satisfying follow up with The Constant Gardener, Meirelles has fallen into misery porn-level drama which would even make a fellow character executioner like Alejandro Iñárritu cringe at the ridiculous obstacles the characters in 360 are forced to stumble through. At a near-two hours, Meirelles’s ensemble piece becomes an astonishingly immersive experience, solely in the way it puts the audience in the uncomfortable and dull state a few of its characters are stuck in. Those characters include a former sex offender (Ben Foster), a bored married couple (Jude Law and Rachel Weisz), an unsatisfied gangster, a dentist in love, a prostitute (Lucia Siposova), an elderly father (Anthony Hopkins) searching for his missing daughter, and some other wasted character whose main purpose is to ridiculously put Tyler, the sex offender, in a seriously uncomfortable situation.

Sure, Fernando Meirelles disappointed everyone with 2008’s Blindness, but that disappointment stemmed from the fact that he had already directed films as good as City of God and The Constant Gardener; expectations were through the roof. Now that we’ve all been knocked back down to Earth, maybe we can take a more balanced, cautious approach to his latest film, 360, which has just released a trailer. What does he have in store for us this time? The first thing that jumps out at you when you watch this trailer is the realization of how good the cast is. It’s kind of hard not to get excited for a film that’s headlined by names like Rachel Weisz, Jude Law, Ben Foster, and Anthony Hopkins. The other thing that’s instantly striking is that Meirelles still seems to be on point as far as the visuals of his films are concerned. Despite the fact that 360 seems to just be a tale about people’s relationships, with a little bit of menace and deceit thrown in, you would think that it was some sort of epic, globe-hopping thriller if you watched it without audio. Not only are there gorgeous locations on display, but everything is shot with Meirelles now trademark blend of classically beautiful photography and cutting edge, stylish experimentation.