Oscar Isaac might be the “strangest poker player” you’ve ever met in the first trailer for “The Card Counter.” And knowing it’s a Paul Schrader film, this might be the strangest gambling movie you’ve ever seen as well.
In “The Card Counter,” Isaac plays an ex-military interrogator-turned-gambler who is haunted by his past actions. His luck changes when he meets a woman played by Tiffany Haddish who wants to make use of his gift at counting cards and a young man played by Tye Sheridan who suspects Isaac may have been made the fall guy by an officer (Willem Dafoe) who landed Isaac in jail.
Just like Schrader’s “First Reformed” before it, “The Card Counter” is hardly just about a gambler, as it grapples with more existential themes in sometimes surreal ways. At the start of the trailer, we see Isaac wrapping every piece of furniture in a hotel room in a sheet as his symbolic way of the burden that he carries everywhere.
“There is a weight a man can accrue. The weight created by his past actions. It is a weight which can never be removed,” Isaac says in the clip.
Schrader wrote and directed “The Card Counter,” and Martin Scorsese is an executive producer on the film. Focus Features, which also distributed Schrader’s “First Reformed,” will release the movie in theaters on Sept. 10. It will also screen as a selection of the Venice Film Festival.
Check out the first trailer here and above.
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