This year's Sundance Film Festival was bland as hell. Sure, there was a horror movie that will make you never look at dollhouses the same way again, but nothing really stole the show. There was no Whiplash or Get Out or Call Me by Your Name like previous years, no standout film that everyone immediately agreed was destined for greatness or at least a SAG award. But there was one thing that everyone agreed on: Sorry to Bother You—Boots Riley's biting-racial-satire-hidden-inside-a-fever-dream directorial debut—is goddamn bonkers.Now, in honor of the film's SXSW premiere, Annapurna released the first trailer for the film Vulture touted as "the punk film that 2018 deserves," and it looks like the hilarious, scathing, batshit crazy movie America needs right now.In Sorry to Bother You, Lakeith Stanfield rises to the top of a secret telemarketer cabal thanks to his ability to do a white voice. The movie is set "in an alternate present-day version of Oakland, [where ] telemarketer Cassius Green discovers a magical key to professional success, propelling him into a macabre universe," according to the synopsis, but that barely scratches the surface of everything going on in this clip. Like, Armie Hammer is an evil corporate exec? What the hell is a "power caller"? Who's that eyepatch guy? And David Cross is definitely doing Stanfield's white-guy voice, right? Good Christ, this is going to be wild.Riley—an activist and member of famed Oakland band The Coup, who's also apparently a genius writer and director—has been working on Sorry to Bother You for a while now. He originally published the film's screenplay in McSweeney's back in 2014, and told VICE in 2015 that he was inspired to write it after taking some film and TV auditions in LA."I was in LA and went by there to have the meeting, but all the roles were like cops or dope dealers," Riley said in the interview. "Why would I want to spend hours and hours of my life fulfilling somebody else's fucked-up vision of the world? I'd rather spend hours and hours of my life putting out my own fucked-up vision of the world."That fucked-up vision of the world is coming July 6, when Annapurna releases Sorry to Bother You in theaters. Until then, bask in the glorious insanity of the trailer above.Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.Follow VICE on Twitter.
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