Alia Shawkat and Callum Turner Star in ‘Atropia’ War Satire – Trailer

Alia Shawkat and Callum Turner star in Atropia, a war satire film set on a U.S. military base that simulates foreign countries to prepare troops for overseas combat.

Severance actor Shawkat plays Fayruz, an aspiring actress who falls in love with a soldier cast as an insurgent, on a base made over to resemble a fictional country known as Atropia.

Also starring in the film are Chloë Sevigny, Tim Heidecker, Zahra Alzubaidi, Lola Kirke, Tony Shawkat, Jane Levy, and Gilberto Ortiz.

Written and directed by Hailey Benton Gates, Atropia world premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival where it won the Grand Jury Prize. It opens in select theaters on December 12th with a wider release planned in January 2026.

Here is the synopsis: Welcome to Atropia: a fake nation created by the U.S. military to train soldiers before their deployment. These simulated towns—built by Hollywood set designers—are brought to life by role players hired to create a sense of “authenticity.”

When an aspiring actress, Fayruz, in a military role-playing facility, falls in love with a soldier, Abu Dice, played by Callum Turner, cast as an insurgent, their unsimulated emotions threaten to derail the performance. What unfolds is an audaciously funny satire that asks: In the performance of war, who are the winners and who are the losers?

“Initially, I set out to make a documentary about the mock villages– how this dystopian community theater was blurring lines between training and performance, reality and artifice,” director Benton Gates said in a statement. “An exploration of how the US casts its enemies, its innocents, its victims, and itself. I spent years interviewing role players and military personnel, but eventually the Department of Defense would not grant access to the parts of the training I was interested in documenting.”

Watch the official trailer of Atropia above.