Nicholas Hoult and Kristen Stewart Find Love in ‘Equals’ Trailer

Man, I hope this turns out to be better than my doubts.

Equals is a futuristic dystopian drama about a new human society called The Collective. Its citizens are called Equals and everyone lives out peaceful, docile, dispassionate lives. Silas (Nicholas Hoult) catches S.O.S. or “Switched On Syndrone” which causes him uncontrollable and disruptive emotions that only Kristen Stewart’s Nia seems to understand.

The trailer is relatively short and barebones, giving us a look at the sterilized world of the Collective and the compelling connection that Hoult and Stewart’s character make with each other.

Here’s the official synopsis:

SILAS (Hoult) lives in a future society called The Collective. The inhabitants of this modern world are a new breed of humans called Equals. Equals are peaceful, calm, fair, and polite. Life in The Collective is perfect; there is no greed, no poverty, no violence, and no emotion. The Equals go through life perfectly serene, disturbed by nothing. But a new disease is threatening everyone: SOS, or Switched-On-Syndrome, is activating in its victims everything they thought they’d escaped: depression, sensitivity, fear, love. Once a person is overtaken with SOS, they are sent away to The Den, and never seen again. Nobody says it, but everyone knows: The Den is where people go to die. When Silas is infected, he becomes an outcast, but he notices one person who seems to understand what he’s going through. NIA (Stewart) has feelings, but she seems to be able to hide them. Only Silas has noticed that she’s different. When he confronts her, they discover a connection that quickly takes over everything. They feel love and intimacy for the first time in their lives. They try to stay away from each other, because the risk of detection is too great, but the pain of being apart is even worse than the pain of living in secret. The only way for them to insure their survival is to escape. But who will help them? Where will they go? With their feelings overtaking them and their love visible to anyone they meet, how can they possibly escape undetected?

So much of this sounds familiar to other recent dystopian sci-fi fare especially The Giver. Also there’s a joke to be made somewhere about Kristen Stewart being called an actress with muddled emotional range, here playing a part where’s she’s secretly emotionally aware.

Ridley Scott is producing this thing after all perhaps it will be turned out to be more nuanced and interesting than its saturated genre. Check out the trailer below.