After an insanely successful year of horror/thrillers in Ti West’s X and its prequel, Pearl, followed by the whimsical Bodies Bodies Bodies, A24 has further established themselves as a real threat in the film industry. It’s fair to say that A24 truly made a name for themselves back in 2018 with Hereditary, starring Toni Colette, subsequently followed by 2019’s Midsommar, starring Florence Pugh. Lately, A24 have expanded their palette, veering away from hit horrors and focusing more on labor-of-love projects that have a lot of heart and soul to them. Enter: When You Finish Saving The World.
A24 just dropped the trailer for When You Finish Saving The World, a drama/comedy surrounding the mother-son relationship of Julianne Moore’s Evelyn Katz and Finn Wolfhard’s Ziggy Katz. Initially, Ziggy and Evelyn struggle to see eye-to-eye, much preferring to connect to others than each other, which eventually leads to Evelyn befriending a young boy at a women’s shelter while Ziggy falls in love with a fellow student.
When You Finish Saving The World also happens to be the directorial debut of established actor Jesse Eisenberg, most known as Columbus in the Zombieland series and Lex Luthor in Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice. Eisenberg last acted in the 2021 thriller Wild Indian alongside Michael Greyeyes and Chaske Spencer. Before that, he starred in the biographical drama Resistance and the sequel to 2009’s Zombieland, Zombieland: Double Tap.
The film is based on Eisenberg’s 2020 audio drama of the same name, which he chose to pursue as a feature-length film. When You Finish Saving The World made its debut at the Sundance Film Festival on January 20, 2022, with majorly positive reviews. Alongside Moore and Wolfhard, Alisha Boe, Jay O. Sanders, Billy Bryk, and Eleonore Hendricks star in supporting roles.
Unfortunately, the trailer doesn’t give us much to go on as far as an official release date. After the title card, some text simply reads: “Coming soon.”