'Don't Look Deeper' Trailer: Catherine Hardwicke's Nightmarish Sci-Fi Series Comes To Quibi

Do A.I. robots dream of high school exams? Catherine Hardwicke's new sci-fi thriller Don't Look Deeper suggests that they dream of their weird, nightmarish origins. This Quibi series follows a high school teenager who begins to suspect that she is not like the other girls. In fact, she might not even be human. Watch the Don't Look Deeper trailer below.

Twilight director Catherine Hardwicke returns to the supernatural high school drama, but with a sci-fi twist in Don't Look Deeper. Her new Quibi series, for which Hardwicke serves as director and executive producer, is set in Merced, California, "15 minutes into the future," and follows a high school senior (Madeline's Madeline breakout Helena Howard) who begins to suspect that she's not exactly human. When she has a strange reaction to an experiment in her science class, it sets off a series of events that put her life, and the lives of her secretive parents (Don Cheadle, Emily Mortimer), in danger.

The trailer is plenty intriguing, with some horror and sci-fi thriller elements seeded throughout, and Howard giving a properly chilling and robotic performance in the lead role. But Don't Look Deeper's home on Quibi naturally gives me pause. But Hardwicke was enthusiastic about the 10-minute episode format for the series, telling Collider in an interview that the script was written in chapters from the beginning.

"We didn't have an old script sitting around that we had to get the scissors out and cut it up into sections," Hardwicke said. "We had something that was conceived that way, which actually I think is relevant to the form." The series plays with memory in a non-linear story structure, which allows memories to be "erased and brought back."

Don't Look Deeper is co-written by Charlie McDonnell and Lost co-creator Jeffrey Lieber, who also serves as showrunner. The series also stars Ema Horvath, Jan Luis Castellanos, Belissa Escobedo, Kaiwi Lyman, Harvey Zielinski, Harvey Guillen, Brandon Win, Kayleigh Gilbert and Dana Gourrier.

Here is the synopsis for Don't Look Deeper:

Set in Merced, California, "fifteen minutes into the future," DON'T LOOK DEEPER centers on a high school senior who can't seem to shake the feeling that something about her just isn't right. And that something is... she's not human... not one of us. This revelation of what she really is, where she comes from, and who has started looking for her, sets in motion a series of events that suddenly puts her entire life in jeopardy.

Don't Look Deeper comes to Quibi on July 27, 2020.