Cate Blanchett's gone missing in the trailer for Richard Linklater's Where'd You Go, Bernadette. Never one to stick with a single genre, Linklater has continued to mix things up since his Oscar-winning Boyhood hit theaters four years ago. In addition to making a spiritual sequel to Dazed and Confused (Everybody Wants Some!!) and an unofficial sequel to The Last Detail (Last Flag Flying), Linklater has gotten to work on Where'd You Go Bernadette, a film adaptation of Maria Semple's best-selling dramedy novel.

Blanchett stars in Where'd You Go, Bernadette as Bernadette Fox, "a Seattle woman who had it all - a loving husband and a brilliant daughter". However, when Bernadette goes missing, it falls to her daughter Bee (Emma Nelson) to figure out where she's gone and what happened to her. The movie's marketing is getting underway too, now that the first trailer's been released online.

You can watch the Where'd You Go, Bernadette trailer in the space below. The film's cast also includes Billy Crudup, Kristen Wiig, and Judy Greer, in addition to Laurence Fishburne in an as-yet undisclosed role. Linklater cowrote the adapted script with Holly Gent and Vincent Palmo Jr. (Me and Orson Welles), after Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber (The Disaster Artist) wrote an earlier draft.


Judging by its trailer and premise, Where'd You Go, Bernadette has the makings of yet another intriguing character study for Linklater to add to his collection. Semple's novel follows Bee as she uncovers more and more about her mother's "secret" life and (maybe) starts to understand her better, and it seems that Linklater's movie follows suit in this regard. The book also unfolds through a collection of documents, so it'll be interesting to see how Linklater and his cowriters adapt that format for the big screen. Linklater has generally excelled when dealing with unconventional narrative structures (see Boyhood, the Before trilogy), so that bodes well for his efforts here.

Where'd You Go, Bernadette was originally scheduled to arrive back in May and then October, but Annapurna has since pushed the film back to March 22, 2019. The movie's trailer will presumably screen with Annapurna's upcoming releases Destroyer and Vice, both of which hit theaters on Christmas Day next week. Annapurna has been struggling financially of late, so hopefully this next wave of films (coupled with If Beale Street Could Talk, which is currently doing well in limited release) will help the studio to turn its commercial prospects around.