Focus Features has released the full Suffragette trailer online. Written by Abi Morgan (Shame) and directed by Sarah Gavron (Brick Lane), the film stars Carey Mulligan as a working-class women’s rights activist in the early days of the feminist movement. Half of the trailer is really good as it shows the hardcore fight for women’s rights, and then it lapses into an irritating trailer cliché.

Can we stop with the latest trailer trend of sad, slower covers of pop songs? This is a film about women as “soldiers” in a serious fight for an important issue, and it feels like someone said, “Well, all the other trailers are putting in sad, slower covers of pop songs! Let’s do it for this one!” And that’s how you get the almost laughably bad moment of people running from explosions to Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide”. But that still isn’t enough to stop me from seeing this movie, which I could easily see being a contender in the awards race due to its great cast, setting, and subject matter.

Check out the trailer below.  The film opens October 23rd, and also stars Helena Bonham-Carter, Brendan Gleeson, Anne Marie Duff, Ben Whishaw, and Meryl Streep.  For more on Suffragette, click here.


Here’s the official synopsis for Suffragette:

SUFFRAGETTE is a thrilling drama that tracks the story of the foot soldiers of the early feminist movement, women who were forced underground to pursue a dangerous game of cat and mouse with an increasingly brutal State. These women were not primarily from the genteel educated classes, they were working women who had seen peaceful protest achieve nothing. Radicalized and turning to violence as the only route to change, they were willing to lose everything in their fight for equality – their jobs, their homes, their children and their lives. MAUD was one such foot soldier. The story of her fight for dignity is as gripping and visceral as any thriller, it is also heart-breaking and inspirational.

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Image via Focus Features