In writer/director Christopher Nolan’s conceit, this idea of openness and trust was betrayed by Odysseus (Matt Damon), in tricking the Trojans to accept the “gift” of a giant wooden horse, secretly filled to the rim with Greek warriors, all of them furious and miserable after spending the better part of a decade away from home in order to win the war for their king, Agamemnon (Benny Safdie). After the appreciative Trojans dragged this giant horse into their city as a symbol of peace with the Greeks, Odysseus and his men snuck out of the structure in the middle of the night, and opened the previously impenetrable Trojan gates in order to let the rest of their army inside, sacking the place in a fury of raping and pillaging. Odysseus won the war, such as it was, but, as Nolan has it, lost a good bit of humanity in the process. 

A brutally candid exploration of lust, obsession, and grief, deliberately blurring the line between romantic drama and psychological horror.

Fennell, whose reputation as a cinematic provocateur comes from a pair of hotly disputed previous films, Promising Young Woman, and Saltburn, seems to be setting up a kind of punishment for our expectations: If we were imagining one of world’s most endearing tragedies about passion being turned into a sexually frank and explicit drama, Fennell suggests strongly we think again. That more or less holds true for the rest of the film. As much as the trailer suggests an unhinged, psycho-sexual bacchanalia, the actual event is far more tame  —  at least, graphically  —  than what we might have imagined.