Daniel Radcliffe Gets ‘Jungle’ Fever in the Survival Thriller’s First Trailer
While there are probably those who would describe Daniel Radcliffe as an actor who has never amounted to much after the Harry Potter franchise, I’ve found his decisions over the past few years to be breathtakingly daring, a risky collection of screw-you titles that could only come from a place of supreme financial security. From Horns to Swiss Army Man and everything in between, Radcliffe has proven himself a gifted performer with a voracious appetite for genre films, becoming something relatively unique in the horror genre: an A-list actor with B-list tastes.
The new trailer for his upcoming survival thriller Jungle is the perfect encapsulation of all his skills, putting the actor on an island and asking him to carry a gut-wrenching movie about a tourist who is forced to survive in the Amazon. It’s relatively high-concept for a thriller, and much like Elijah Wood before him, Radcliffe has proven he’s more than up to the task.
Those wondering how far Jungle is willing to go with its premise would do well to note the presence of director Greg McLean, best known as the mind behind the ultra-violent Australian horror film Wolf Creek and its sequel(s). That suggests that Jungle won’t be content to tell a life-affirming story of survival and perseverance a la Castaway or 127 Hours; Jungle has all the earmarks of a pretty vicious movie, and it’s no wonder that the early reviews make mention of McLean’s background. “If you need a gut-twisting scene of a leech being dug out of a man’s forehead using only tweezers,” Variety notes, “McLean’s gladly your man.” Maybe don’t see this one on an empty stomach.
Here’s the full plot synopsis for Jungle:
In the early 1980s, 22-year-old Israeli backpacker Yossi Ghinsberg and two friends — Swiss teacher Marcus Stamm and American photographer Kevin Gale — set off from the Bolivian city of La Paz on what was supposed to be the adventure of a lifetime. Leading the way into the uncharted Amazon was an Austrian expat named Karl Ruprechter, who had met the friends just days before and claimed to be familiar with the region. But their dream trip soon turned into a wilderness nightmare from which not all of the men returned.
Jungle will hit theaters on October 20, 2017.