What happens when a group of friends decide to bare it all for one another? Not literally, of course, though the decision to let your friends have full access to your phone may well feel like a kind of nakedness. This is the premise behind Manolo Caro‘s Mexican adaptation of the Italian dark comedy Perfect Strangers (Perfectos desconocidos). Turning his attention to the secrets that lie hidden in your smartphone (“the device has become the black box of our lives,” as one character puts it) the Casa de las Flores creator has cooked up a big screen dinner party unlike any you’ve ever attended.
The hosts are Eva (Cecilia Suarez, Pau-li-na herself!) and Antonio (Bruno Bichir), who open their chic home to five friends to commemorate a lunar eclipse. As the wine flows and conversation turns to how the couples at the table pretend to not have any secrets to hide, Eva proposes a game: they’ll all put their phones in front of them and will read out and answer any and all texts and calls that come through. But what first starts out as a fun parlor game soon turns much darker when sexts and compromising pics start blowing up phones and relationships alike.
As the first full trailer shows, Eva and Antonio’s pitch-perfect dining room plays host to an increasingly claustrophobic game. A Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? for the selfie-generation, Caro is diving into what privacy and intimacy look like in the digital age, where a group selfie is interrupted by a text that reads “I wanna fuck” and where a single incriminating picture threatens an otherwise perfect couple. Tapping into its black humor and showing glimpses of drunken slaps, passionate kisses, and angered tears, the trailer ends up asking: Are you game?
The film stars a slew of Mexican actors that are part of a budding generation easily shuttling between US and Mexican productions, including Mariana Treviño (Club de Cuervos, Overboard), Manuel García Rulfo (The Magnificent Seven, the upcoming Widows), Miguel Rodarte (Time Share) and Ana Claudia Talancón (The Crime of Father Amaro). Check out the full trailer below.
Perfect Strangers opens in the US on January 11, 2019