Desierto trailer: Jeffrey Dean Morgan plays menacing anti-immigrant sniper

Ahead of his return to television as Negan, the murderous villain on the upcoming seventh season of AMC’s The Walking Dead, Jeffrey Dean Morgan is tackling a similarly-maniacal role in Mexican filmmaker Jonás Cuarón’s Desierto, which released a new trailer Tuesday afternoon.

In the film, Morgan plays Sam, a ruthless, gun-wielding vigilante mercilessly hunting a band of unarmed migrant workers through the scorching desert as they attempt to cross the border between Mexico and the United States.

Mozart in the Jungle‘s Gael García Bernal co-leads the film as Moises, the leader of the group of immigrants trying to reach his son, who lives in America.

Cuarón, who penned the screenplay for Gravity with his father, director Alfonso Cuarón, co-wrote the script for Desierto with Mateo Garcia. The elder Cuarón also serves as a producer on Desierto, alongside his brother (and Jonás’ uncle), Carlos.

Desierto was selected to represent Cuarón’s home nation of Mexico in the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar race. It debuted in 2015 at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it won the FIPRESCI International Critics’ Award in the Special Presentations program, for “using pure cinema to create a strong physical sensation of being trapped in a vast space and hunted down by hatred in its most primal form.”

STX Entertainment, the distributor behind Bad Moms, which has grossed $100 million (and counting) at the domestic box office so far this year, will release Desierto in theaters on Oct. 14. Watch the film’s new trailer in the video above.