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AVA (2020) Trailer | Jessica Chastain Assassin Action Thriller Movie

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Jessica Chastain trades prestige drama for a silencer in the first trailer for “Ava.”

Vertical Entertainment unveiled the official trailer for “Ava” in late June 2020, giving the first extended look at Chastain as an elite black-ops assassin who breaks protocol in a very specific way — she likes to tell her targets exactly what they did to earn a bullet before she fires it. Directed by Tate Taylor and written by Matthew Newton, the film pairs globe-trotting contract killings with a messy homecoming, and it’s built around a lead performance that leans hard into physical, hand-to-hand action rather than the courtroom and period dramas Chastain is best known for.

• Ava Faulkner (Jessica Chastain), a recovering addict turned contract killer, gets marked for execution by organization boss Simon (Colin Farrell) after a botched hit tied to bad intel — despite her mentor Duke (John Malkovich) telling her to lay low instead.
• Ava’s return to Boston to see her hospitalized mother Bobbi (Geena Davis) and sister Judy (Jess Weixler) is complicated by the discovery that Judy is now with Ava’s ex-fiancé Michael (Common), who owes a dangerous debt to Joan Chen’s underground gambling operation.
• Tate Taylor stepped in to direct after Matthew Newton exited in August 2018 amid domestic abuse allegations, reuniting Taylor with Chastain nearly a decade after “The Help,” ahead of a September 25, 2020 limited theatrical and VOD release.

The Setup: A Killer With Rules

The trailer frames Ava as a professional who’s good at her job for the wrong reasons — she’s precise, she’s fast, and she can’t resist making her hits personal. That habit of confronting marks before killing them is presented as both her signature and her liability, the thing that makes her memorable to watch and dangerous to employ. It’s a similar high-concept hook to what Vertical and other distributors leaned on with “Project Power,” another 2020 action thriller built around a lead with a very specific, very lethal skill set.

The inciting incident is a job that goes wrong because of faulty intelligence, not because Ava hesitates or fails. Duke, played by John Malkovich as her longtime handler, tells her to disappear for a while and let the situation cool. Instead, Simon — Colin Farrell playing the organization’s cold, calculating leader — decides the smarter move is to eliminate the problem outright, putting a target on Ava that turns the rest of the film into her fighting to survive the very outfit she’s spent her career killing for.

Simon wants her gone. Duke wants her hidden. Ava just wants five minutes to explain herself before she pulls the trigger.

Family Ties Complicate the Job

Parallel to the professional threat, the trailer sends Ava back to Boston to patch things up with a family she’s kept at arm’s length. Her mother Bobbi, played by Geena Davis, is hospitalized, and her sister Judy, played by Jess Weixler, is dealing with old resentment toward Ava that hasn’t gone away just because Ava’s been out of the country killing people for a living.

The wrinkle that gives the homecoming its own tension: Judy is now romantically involved with Michael, Ava’s ex-fiancé, played by Common. Michael isn’t a clean slate either — he’s run up debts with an underground gambling ring controlled by Toni, played by Joan Chen, which means Ava’s return home carries its own kind of danger even before Simon’s crew shows up looking for her.

Behind the Camera: A Troubled Path to the Screen

“Ava” started life under the title “Eve” with Matthew Newton attached to direct his own script. Newton stepped away from directing duties in August 2018 after renewed scrutiny over past domestic abuse allegations, though he kept the screenwriting credit. Tate Taylor took over behind the camera, marking his second collaboration with Chastain after directing her in “The Help.”

Chastain also produces the film alongside Kelly Carmichael and Nicolas Chartier, giving her control on both sides of the camera for a role built around stunt work and combat choreography rather than the character-driven dramas that made her name. Stephen Goldblatt handled cinematography and Bear McCreary composed the score, rounding out a crew with real genre pedigree behind an ensemble that also includes Farrell, Malkovich, Davis, Weixler, Common and Chen.

Release Plans

As of the trailer’s release, “Ava” is set for a limited theatrical run alongside a video-on-demand release in the United States on September 25, 2020 — one of a shrinking list of studio and specialty titles still holding a firm date that summer, a period covered in detail in the roundup of the only big movies left that still may come out in 2020. The day-and-date approach mirrors the strategy other 2020 action releases were testing, including “The Old Guard,” which paired Charlize Theron with a straight-to-streaming action showcase that same summer.

Whether “Ava” plays in theaters at all by September depends entirely on how the rest of the summer shakes out, but the trailer itself gives Chastain the kind of hand-to-hand, gun-in-each-hand sequence she hasn’t had a real shot at before — and puts Farrell across from her as the guy who signed the order to have her killed.