Matt Damon Fights for His Daughter’s Freedom Abroad in ‘Stillwater’

Things have been surprisingly quiet on the Tom McCarthy front since his 2015 film Spotlight won the Oscars for Best Picture and earned him and Josh Singer a win for Best Original Screenplay. Since then McCarthy co-wrote Christopher Robin and wrote/directed the Disney+ film Timmy Failure: Mistakes Were Made, but we haven’t seen him direct the kind of follow-up you’d expect to a movie that earned the biggest Oscar there is. 

That changes now, as we see in the first trailer for his new feature Stillwater. Released by Focus Features, the film was originally set for a plum awards date of November 6, 2020, but COVID delays caused it to be pushed back and the studio is now dropping it in the thick of summer, on July 30, 2021. It’s a surprising release date for what on paper seems to be one of the biggest awards contenders of the year, but we’re in strange times so it might not be an indication of anything worrisome. 

Certainly the film feels like a big player. Billed as a dramatic thriller, Stillwater stars Matt Damon as a oil rig worker in Oklahoma who must travel to Marseille when his daughter (Abigail Breslin) is arrested for a murder she says she’s innocent of. Naturally, it becomes Damon’s mission to clear his daughter’s name. 

Check out the trailer below, and see Stillwater in theaters on July 30th: