'Totally Under Control' Trailer: Oscar Winner Alex Gibney Made A Coronavirus Documentary In Secret

It's no secret that the coronavirus pandemic is deadly, but despite all the headlines and reports providing new details on how COVID-19 has killed infected millions and killed hundreds of thousands, there's still a lot we don't know about how this crisis has been handled. But Oscar-winning documentarian Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) teamed up with directors Ophelia Harutyunyan and Suzanne Hillinger to find out everything they could about what made this catastrophe far worse than it needed to be. The result is a new documentary called Totally Under Control, and the first trailer is here to enrage you.

Here's the official synopsis to give you a better idea of what this documentary shines a light on:

On January 20th, 2020 the US and South Korea both discovered their first cases of COVID-19. However, 9 months later, the novel Coronavirus has claimed the lives of over 200,000 Americans and caused staggering economic damage, while in South Korea, there were no significant lockdowns and, in an urbanized population of 51 million, only 344 lives have been lost. Where did we go wrong? As the presidential election nears, Americans are increasingly enraged by a lack of clear leadership, endemic political corruption and left to wonder how did the wealthiest and most powerful country in the world manage to fail so thoroughly in its response to a global pandemic?

Academy Award-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney, directing with Ophelia Harutyunyan and Suzanne Hillinger, interrogates this question and its devastating implications in Totally Under Control. With damning testimony from public health officials and hard investigative reporting, Gibney exposes a system-wide collapse caused by a profound dereliction of Presidential leadership.

It will be a generation before we know the full extent of the damage wrought by this pandemic, but Totally Under Control will stand as the definitive account of the Trump administration's incompetence, corruption and denial in the face of this global pandemic.

This documentary was done entirely in secret, which is why we never heard about it until the trailer arrived. The secrecy ensured that Gibney, Harutyunyan, and Hillinger were able to work under the radar, get honest answers from the most knowledgeable people, and didn't have to worry about anyone upending their work or trying to sabotage their efforts to get to the bottom of this never-ending nightmare. The trailer also shows how they  pulled off such a production, keeping subjects away from the filmmakers on-hand for interviews and separated by various protective measures.

We're probably not going to like what we hear in this documentary, and there's a reason this is arriving not long before the election. Pay attention and make the right choice when you go to the polls this November.

Totally Under Control arrives on VOD on October 13, 2020 and will then be on Hulu starting on October 20.