Natalie Portman’s television actress spends time with real-life paedophile teacher, played by Julianne Moore, in a bid to portray her on the big screen in the trailer of Todd Haynes’s dark melodrama May December.

Dropped on Tuesday, the two-minute-36-second-long video begins with Portman’s character responding to a journalist’s question about how she chooses her roles for films. Then we see her paying a visit to Moore’s Gracie, the woman she is set to play in a movie.

Moore’s character Gracie is loosely based on an American teacher — Mary Kay Letourneau — who had raped a seventh-grader in the 1990s and later married him. “What would make a 36-year-old woman have an affair with a seventh grader?” Portman is confronted with this question before she sets on a deeply disturbing journey that unsettles her.

Also starring Charles Melton, May December premiered at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year. It is slated to release in theatres on November 17 and then hit Netflix on December 1.