This week we’ll listen to the trailer for The Testaments, a new Hulu tv series based on a dystopian Margaret Atwood novel set years after the events of The Handmaid’s Tale. For the opening 19 seconds of the trailer we have voiceover from Agnes (played by rising star Chase Infiniti, who co-starred in One Battle After Another), as we see her present her dollhouse, with scene inserts of real people acting out the roles of the dolls she is describing. Meanwhile, the music sticks to gentle cinematic minimalism, slowly pivoting between two neighbouring notes using a voice-like synthesizer. It feels vaguely creepy, but we’re nowhere near horror film scoring. Yet.

Pixar's longest-running franchise is back for round five. The official trailer for Toy Story 5 dropped on February 19th, and while the teaser back in November leaned into INXS' "Never Tear Us Apart" as a statement of loyalty between toys and their kids, this full trailer takes a decidedly different tonal approach, trading a trailer deep in its feels for one that pivots towards a near-manic declaration of war against screens.

The official trailer for Maggie Gyllenhaal’s film The Bride, set in 1930s Chicago, opens with the death of the title character (played by Jessie Buckley). At 0:06 we see the title character fall to her death in slow motion. Heartbeats begins to be heard, faint and slow at first. A frantic voiceover from the bride exclaims that she did not want any of this, and at 0:14 the heartbeat is now twice as frequent. At 0:18 we add the sound of a ticking clock (a motif commonly found in suspenseful trailers dating back at least as far as the 2017 Dunkirk trailer).