It’s wintertime, which means that we’re slow-rolling through the frenzy of celebratory list-making and honors that is awards season; it’s that stretch of the year where studios make their biggest, showiest haymakers, from The Imitation Game, to The Theory of Everything, to Unbroken, to Selma. But amid the larger releases, smaller, quieter entries make their own entreaties to voters and viewers alike, such as Jean-Marc Vallée’s Wild and the new Julianne Moore vehicle, Still Alice, which has received its first trailer (seen above).

The film comes to us from the director duo of Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland, most recently responsible for the Errol Flynn biopic The Last of Robin Hood. Still Alice puts them in a similar narrative mode, only this time they’re not commemorating an icon of Hollywood’s golden age; instead, they’re exploring the ordeal of living with early onset Alzheimer’s, adapting novelist Lisa Genova’s self-published 2007 debut to the screen.

In Still Alice, Moore plays a successful cognitive psychologist who is diagnosed with the chronic disease and struggles to maintain balance in all aspects of her life – her marriage, her role as a parent, her job – despite memory loss and communicative difficulties. Based on the trailer, the film doesn’t necessarily document her triumph against the illness as much as it articulates her efforts to adapt to living with it; Genova’s book reportedly paints a very realistic portrait of how Alzheimer’s impacts both people who develop it and their loved ones. The onus is on Glatzer and Westmoreland to achieve the same feat.

Initial buzz for the film, however, doesn’t say much about whether Still Alice hits those same notes of truth and honesty or not. The focus is instead squarely on Moore, with all other attentions being divided between the rest of the picture’s supporting cast (including Kristen Stewart and Alec Baldwin). Early reviews make Moore’s portrayal sound quite sterling (and, if nothing else, a nice change of pace from her recent work in films like The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1); if you’re a betting person, odds seem to favor her getting Best Actress nods come the Golden Globes and the Academy Awards.

Still Alice opens wide on January 16th, 2015, following a brief, Oscar-qualifying, limited theatrical run in 2014.