In the preview, we see that Nate’s assignment might be more than he can handle. He seems pretty green, and the white supremacists he has to befriend and manipulate certainly aren’t messing around. “I don’t have the skills for this,” he tells his case agent, Angela (played by Toni Collette). “I can’t even defend myself.”
Confident or not, we see Nate accept the challenge, doing everything he needs to be convincing, from shaving his head and getting tatted up to studying up on neo-Nazi reading material. The real hard work, though, is keeping suspicion off himself as he gathers information on the group’s deadly plot. The members clearly have trust issues, and multiple men make ominous comments to Nathan during the short span of the roughly two-minute preview.
“It’s like they say at these rallies. You look to the left, look to the right, you know, one of these people is a snitch,” says one man. “It’s the left,” he adds, looking straight at Nathan, who sits on his left.
The characters we see in the trailer are all extremely convincing, and that is perhaps what makes the film look so frightening. It is uncomfortably realistic; in fact, the story is based on the experiences of former FBI agent Michael German, who spent years working undercover in neo-Nazi and militia groups. German co-wrote Imperium with Daniel Ragussi, the film’s director.
The film also stars Burn Gorman and is set for theatrical release on August 19.
