Bad Times At The El Royale Trailer Features Shirtless Chris Hemsworth, Unsettling Jon Hamm

Nothing is what is seems, and nobody is who they appear to be, in the first trailer for writer-director Drew Goddard's kaleidoscopic thriller noir Bad Times at the El Royale.

The brand-new peek at the film introduces audiences to seven secret-keeping strangers who find themselves checking into the dilapidated El Royale hotel — an establishment that sits on the border of California and Nevada, where it holds more than a few secrets of its own. 

Shortly after arrival, the guests — which include Mad Men alum Jon Hamm as an eerie vacuum salesman, Dakota Johnson and Cailee Spaeny as two sisters on the run, Cynthia Erivo as a soul singer, Chris Hemsworth as a perpetually shirtless cult leader with an ego the size of the moon, and Jeff Bridges as a priest who is definitely not actually a priest and is probably, maybe a priest-killer or something wild like that — quickly catch on that the El Royale really is "no place for a priest," or for anyone who doesn't want to get tangled up in serious trouble. 

Inside the El Royale, there's a random murder, a maze of hidden hallways, trap doors and false mirrors, poisoned cocktails, a woman held captive, and a table covered in telephone wires; outside of it, there's cash raining from the sky, a masked man holding a gun beside an overturned truck, and "him" — Hemsworth's cult leader who poses an unknown threat to the hotel's residents. 

Director Goddard, who scored an Oscar nomination for scripting The Martian, described Bad Times at the El Royale a "love letter" to crime fiction and film noir. "I'm just a fan of the genre, so I don't overthink it," the filmmaker told Entertainment Weekly. "I just trust in my love of crime fiction and let that seep in."

It's clear that Goddard knows how to craft a thrilling film — his directorial debut The Cabin in the Woods opened in 2012 to a waterfall of critical praise, soon being heralded as a new kind of horror movie that subverted the growing-trite genre — and it looks as though he's done the same with Bad Times at the El Royale, an entry into his filmography that could prove another hit and perhaps change the way we view crime thrillers.

Check into Bad Times at the El Royale on October 5.