The New Poster For HARDCORE Is A Fistful!

Director Ilya Naishuller isn’t here to bullshit you. The popularity of his direction on Biting Elbow’s Bad Motherfucker music video has gone ridiculously viral in the last year or more, and its given him just the momentum he needed to film his latest first-person endeavor, Hardcore, centered on a resurrected robot who must rescue his wife/creator from an evil telekinetic with the help of actor Sharlto Copley.

The film already has a teaser clip now making the rounds as of last year, offering an amazingly gruesome and awesomely brutal sample of the delightful that awaits, and no less muscled in further with Wanted helmer Timur Bekmambatov producing. Alas, there’s no need to take my word for it with tickets now available for Midnight Madness premiere next Friday at the Toronto International Film Festival, and the new poster along with Colin Geddes’s program notes pretty much do all the talking from here.

After breaking the Internet with a jawdropping first-person-perspective music video for his band Biting Elbows, director Ilya Naishuller doubles down with his debut feature. Once again delivering outrageous, unbroken POV action, he pushes the conceit to dizzying heights, hurtling the camera through a parade of breathless spectacles. Assisted by a team of fearless cinematographers and stunt performers, Naishuller’s astonishingly propulsive style — recalling the mechanized gaze of James Cameron’s and Paul Verhoeven’s respective cyborgs, as well as the hyperreal aesthetics and minimalist narrative architecture of first-person video games like Half-Life and Mirror’s Edge — gives us a new breed of action movie that’s practically a pure distillation of the genre itself. 

So strap yourself in, put your helmet on, and apply all the action-movie adjectives, because this time they ain’t just spewing hyperbole: Hardcore is a non-stop, action-packed, white-knuckle, crackerjack thrill ride, and once it starts, there is no getting off!