Joe Cole Fights for His Life in the Relentless New Trailer for A24’s A Prayer Before Dawn

It’s been nearly nine months since we saw any new footage from A24’s forthcoming action-drama A Prayer Before Dawn, but that drought ends today with the debut of the true story-inspired film’s intense second trailer.

Joe Cole, best known for his scrappy turns in Peaky Blinders and A24’s Green Room, stars as young English boxer Billy Moore, who finds himself incarcerated in not one, but two of Thailand’s most notorious prisons. Plunged into a hellish world of drugs and gang violence in which only the strong survive, Moore’s one chance at freedom comes in the form of savage, prison authority-sanctioned Muay Thai boxing tournaments, forcing him to fight tooth-and-nail to defend his life and regain his freedom.

Johnny Mad Dog director Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire shot A Prayer Before Dawn on location in Thailand’s Nakhon Pathom Prison, filling out the bulk of the film’s cast with actual inmates, but this is clearly Cole’s show. The young actor manages both humanizing vulnerability and shocking brutality in the space of the trailer’s mere minute and change, portending a powerful performance with the potential to vault Cole to leading-man status.

A Prayer Before Dawn opens on Aug. 10, though it’s available now on DirectTV. Watch the film’s new trailer below and revisit its first right here.