Jude Law stars in the ‘Black Sea’ trailer

Focus Features has debuted the first trailer for Black Sea, the Jude Law (The Grand Budapest Hotel) led thriller directed by Kevin Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland). Black Sea recounts the story of a submarine captain who, along with a rag tag crew of men, sets out to claim abandoned Nazi treasure in a Hitler U-boat on the bottom of the Black Sea.

The film also stars Scoot McNairy (Gone Girl), Ben Mendelsohn (Starred Up), Michael Smiley (The World’s End), and Jodie Whittaker (Attack the Block). In the trailer, a Scottish Jude Law assembles a team of divers and crewmen and promises to split the earnings evenly with the other members, but greed begins to pit the crew members against each other in the tight confines of the sub.

The trailer delivers a sense of claustrophobia captured in similar films like Wolfgang Petersen’s submarine epic, Das Boot, except with added pulp by way of Nazi gold.

The sort of action thriller that Black Sea prescribes is fresh territory for Kevin Macdonald, who started off his career as a documentarian. Even the director’s narrative films have mainly been placed within a historical or political context, while Black Sea’s Nazi gold backstory seems purely superficial for purposes to drive the story. Focus Features, similarly, is usually in the business of distributing smaller, more artistic driven films, but perhaps they are trying to expand their lineup of work.

Black Sea will be released in theaters on January 23rd of next year.