Meryl Streep plays a widow who helps expose worldwide fraud in the dizzying first trailer for The Laundromat, director Steven Soderbergh’s upcoming Netflix film about the Panama Papers scandal.
The clip opens with a pair of shady law firm partners, Jürgen Mossack (Gary Oldman) and Ramón Mora (Antonio Banderas), breaking the fourth wall as they stare into the camera and outline the broad strokes of the true story. “First, you must ask yourself, ‘Are you wealthy?’” Mossack says. “Simple truth of the world is that [with] most games, for someone to win, well, someone has to lose … Think of this as a fairy tale that actually happened.”
The preview then cuts to Streep’s Ellen Martin, a widow who learns she’s victim of insurance fraud — and decides to investigate. “Bribery, corruption, money laundering, millions and millions and millions of dollars,” she says later in the clip. “Somebody has to sound the alarm.”
David Schwimmer, Jeffrey Wright, Robert Patrick and Sharon Stone also star in The Laundromat, which premieres September 1st at the Venice Film Festival, followed by a theatrical release on September 27th and Netflix streaming on October 18th.
Soderbergh and writer Scott Z. Burns (The Informant!, Contagion) based The Laundromat on Jake Bernstein’s 2017 book, Secrecy World: Inside the Panama Papers Investigation of Illicit Money Networks and the Global Elite, which explored how Panamanian company Mossack Fonseca aided the super-rich in concealing wealth and evading taxes.
Burns also wrote and directed the upcoming film drama The Report, based on the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture techniques.
