Martin Scorsese's 'Silence' Has All The Brooding Priests You Could Want This Christmas

At last, the final mystery of Oscar season is here.

Tuesday night, Paramount dropped the trailer for Martin Scorsese’s “Silence,” the only major awards contender that has yet to screen for press. For a while there, we didn’t know whether the long-gestating drama about 17th-century Jesuit priests (Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver) proselytizing in Japan would even open in 2016. What we did know was that the movie, based on Shūsaku Endō’s 1966 novel, is long as hell. Scorsese’s original cut was reportedly 3 hours and 15 minutes, but he’s since trimmed it to a taut 2 hours and 39 minutes. (Hey, at least it’s shorter than “The Wolf of Wall Street.”)

Co-starring Liam Neeson, Ciarán Hinds and Tadanobu Asano, “Silence” opens in limited release Dec. 23 and expands in January. Watch the trailer below and get ready for some old-fashioned religious persecution. The perfect Christmas treat!