The first trailer for “The Serpent’s Skin,” debuting exclusively on IndieWire, doesn’t so much introduce Alice Maio Mackay’s next feature as it lets the witchy saga lock eyes with you. Daring you to look away from an aughts-coded dreamscape coupling desire and dread as inseparable forces, the promo comes ahead of the sultry monster movie’s theatrical rollout from Dark Star Pictures. The trailer finally lends visuals to a promising queer film that’s been building buzz on the festival circuit since last year.
Championed by IndieWire since it played at the Fantasia Film Festival in Montreal, “The Serpent’s Skin” confirms Maio Mackay has entered a darker, moodier phase of her already prolific career. Co-written with longtime collaborator Benjamin Pahl Robinson, the young Australian’s sixth movie follows Anna (Alexandra McVicker), a trans girl who flees a hostile hometown only to discover a city crawling with new ghosts.
Enter Gen (Avalon Fast), the magnetic woman Anna feels she’s been seeing in her dreams. Their connection is immediate, supernatural, and deeply erotic. But when the pair’s powers accidentally transform Anna’s former fling Danny (Jordan Dulieu) into something horrific, the trio is forced to reckon with the destruction intimacy can summon.
The trailer leans hard into Maio Mackay’s love of ‘90s cult television. She cited the gothic melodrama of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and the romantic mysticism of “Charmed” in an interview with IndieWire last year, further describing a creative evolution that’s pushing her aesthetic into more tactile, sensual territory in her most recent films. Read Demons Hate Her! 21-Year-Old Alice Maio Mackay Just Made Six Feature Films in Four Years
Edited by Vera Drew and executive produced by Louise Weard, the movie balances low-budget ingenuity with adolescent clarity, letting romance pulse like a kind of fantastic panic. McVicker and Fast have a charged, gravitational chemistry that grounds Maio Mackay for a love story that’s bruisingly human.
From Dark Star Pictures, “The Serpent’s Skin” opens in New York on March 27 and in Los Angeles on April 3 — with more dates to be announced. Watch the trailer below.