A new trailer for Alice Through The Looking Glass dropped Tuesday, revealing more about director James Bobin’s sequel to Tim Burton’s 2010 film Alice in Wonderland. Mia Wasikowska returns as Alice, Helena Bonham Carter returns as the Red Queen, Anne Hathaway returns as the White Queen, and Victorian misogyny returns as the villain. Linda Woolverton, who wrote both films, said in 2010 that to create her version of Lewis Carroll’s character, she “did a lot of research on Victorian mores, on how young girls were supposed to behave, and then did exactly the opposite.” So it’s fitting that Alice Through The Looking Glass seems to be framed by Alice’s institutionalization for that most Victorian of ailments, female hysteria. Her diagnosis is delivered by Sherlock’s Andrew Scott, probably the platonic ideal of actors you don’t want running your asylum. Judging from the trailer, Alice escapes back into Underland, where things are going badly: Johnny Depp’s Mad Hatter is looking unwell even by the standards set by Johnny Depp’s Mad Hatter, and Grace Slick sounds like Pink.
The framing device will be familiar to anyone whose childhood nightmares were fueled by Walter Murch’s Return to Oz, in which Dorothy Gale is institutionalized, prescribed electroshock therapy, and escapes by returning to Oz, where things are going badly. A PG rating in 2016 doesn’t allow for as much as it did in 1985, however, and there’s no indication that Alice Through The Looking Glass will feature Cronenbergian body horror or Gilliamesque monstrosities. Sacha Baron Cohen’s Time is, at best, mildly creepy, so it looks like parents are going to have to find another way to inadvertently terrify their children—thanks, MPAA! Still, given what a bait-and-switch Return to Oz was (it had a heartwarming trailer), there’s at least a small chance Disney is up to its old tricks with Alice Through The Looking Glass. Alice in Wonderland ended with its hero on the way to open trade with China for the British—and she’s wearing a Mandarin collar in the trailer—so perhaps a generation of youth will be scarred by a gritty fantasia on the Opium Wars. Audiences will have to wait until May 27 to find out!
