Roadside Attractions and Vertical released the first trailer for The Gallerist on Thursday, and it wastes no time getting to the crime. Natalie Portman stars as Polina Polinski, a Miami gallery owner whose finances and personal life are both unraveling on the eve of Art Basel, when art influencer Dalton Hardberry, played by Zach Galifianakis, dies by accident inside her gallery.
Rather than call the police, Polina makes the choice that drives the whole film. She presents the body as the provocative centerpiece of her debut show and sets out to sell it before anyone starts asking the wrong questions. Jenna Ortega plays Kiki Gorman, Polina’s executive director and assistant, who gets pulled into the scheme as its reluctant accomplice while influencers circle the gallery and detectives close in.
Cathy Yan, who directed Birds of Prey, directed the film from a script she wrote with James Pedersen. The ensemble around Portman and Ortega includes Catherine Zeta-Jones as Kiki’s aunt Marianne Gorman, a legendary art dealer who arrives to help move the piece, Sterling K. Brown as Polina’s ex-husband Tom Mayer, Da’Vine Joy Randolph as emerging artist Stella Burgess, Daniel Brühl, and Charli xcx as Alex, the girlfriend of the man on the gallery floor.
Trevor Decker News first covered The Gallerist back in January, when the film made its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival and early reviews singled out the chemistry between its two leads. The trailer suggests a dark comedy that treats the art world as a crime scene where everyone is selling something.
The Gallerist opens in theaters on December 4 from Roadside Attractions and Vertical.