Whistleblower Trailer: 'These People Specialize in F****ed Up'

You might remember from last week that Rachel Weisz means business. And now she has taken her business to Bosnia for The Whistleblower, the first trailer for which has made its way online. It looks a little rough -- like a rip of a VHS tape of a foreign trailer uploaded via dial-up (its pirate-suing producer Nicolas Chartier will no doubt get to the bottom of this) -- but the movie itself could be just the thing to get the distribution community stirring ahead of this fall's biggest festivals.

Weisz stars as a "single mother 5,000 miles from home" -- Nebraska, specifically, where her character works as a police officer. Dispatched to Bosnia in 1999 as part of a UN peacekeeping mission, she soon discovers an underground sex-slave ring comprising numerous missing girls from the region. The deeper the digs, the more damning evidence she finds pointing to a cover-up -- not to mention David Strathairn, Monica Bellucci and Vanessa Redgrave. So you've got pedigree, you've got intrigue, you've got skeptical Weisz telling a mouthbreathing peer, "Something f***ed-up is going on." His reply: "Honey, this is Bosnia. These people specialize in f***ed-up."

This reel is likely what international buyers saw at Cannes, meaning the completed film should get the Venice and Toronto treatment come early fall. It wouldn't shock me to see Summit or -- depending on timing and what kind of splashy how-do-you-do the distributor's eventual buyers want to make -- Miramax pick this up for a January-February release date. And I wouldn't be surprised to see it do well with audiences, too; it looks pretty well-done overall, right? And Rachel Weisz! She means business! (Hey, it worked last weekend for Agora.)

VERDICT: Sold!