The first teaser trailer for highly anticipated Ridley Scott thriller The Counselor, based on novelist Cormac McCarthy's debut screenplay and featuring a stellar cast, has hit the web.

The story of a lawyer (Michael Fassbender) who gets in over his head when he foolishly dabbles in the drug-trafficking trade, the film also stars Brad Pitt, Javier Bardem, Cameron Diaz and Penélope Cruz. If Bardem's presence has you recalling his Oscar-winning turn in the Coen brothers' No Country for Old Men, itself based on a McCarthy novel, the teaser's ominous tone only adds to the sense that The Counselor might be a spiritual sequel.

That El Paso road sign suggests the action plays out once again on the Tex-Mex border badlands, and the Spanish actor even sports a bizarre hairdo to match his 70s mullet from the Coens' film. This time around, he's playing a wealthy acquaintance of Fassbender's character, and that spiky black mop is certainly a look that screams playboy. Pitt, meanwhile, portrays a thug who brokers the central drug deal. Diaz plays Bardem's lover, while the latter's real-life wife, Cruz, plays Fassbender's squeeze.

McCarthy's Pulitzer-winning novel The Road was also adapted by Hollywood for a 2009 John Hillcoat film starring Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee as a father and son negotiating their way through a post-apocalyptic wasteland. No Country for Old Men is said to have begun life as a screenplay, though the film that hit cinemas in 2007 was based on the Coens' own adapted script.

The Counselor is out on 25 October in the US, with Australia due to follow on 14 November and the UK on 15 November.