'Child Of God' Trailer: Hobo With A Shotgun

By Angie Han/Jan. 21, 2014 6:00 am EST

2013 was a big year for James Franco. Not only did he star in a whole bunch of things, from Spring Breakers to Oz the Great and Powerful to This Is the End to ABC's The Mindy Project, he also hit the film festival circuit with three separate films that he'd directed. Two of them, Interior. Leather Bar. and As I Lay Dying, have already received limited theatrical releases, but the third, Child of God, is still on its way.

Based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy, the crime drama stars Scott Haze as an outcast who retreats from society, and becomes progressively more disturbed and degraded. The first teaser hit back in August, and now a full-length trailer has finally arrived. Tim Blake Nelson, Jim Parrack, and James Franco also star. Check it out after the jump.

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Post by The Film Stage.

Child of God is by most accounts an ambitious, if not entirely successful, work. Haze's Lester is an object of both pity and extreme disgust, and — as you'd expect from a McCarthy adaptation — the movie never shies away from his shocking violent tendencies. Unfortunately, the trailer just makes it look like your run-of-the-mill horror film, albeit one with fairly strong performances. This is one case in which the teaser was way better.

(From Russ: I saw the film when it played as a secret screening at Fantastic Fest last year, and I think it is pretty damn good — if nothing else it may be the purest vision of Cormac McCarthy to hit the screen, and Scott Haze, the lead, is seriously determined in his performance. That said, it isn't for everyone, and doesn't shy away from alienating audiences right off the bat.)

Child of God has yet to get a release date.

Set in mountainous Sevier County, Tennessee, Child of God tells the story of Lester Ballard, a dispossessed, violent man whom the narrator describes as "a child of God much like yourself perhaps." Ballard's life is a disastrous attempt to exist outside the social order. Successively deprived of parents and homes and with few other ties, Ballard descends literally and figuratively to the level of a cave dweller as he falls deeper into crime and degradation.