The Imitation Game film: New trailer shows Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing struggling to crack the Enigma code

Keira Knightley and Matthew Goode also star in 'the British film of the year'

Keira Knightley and Benedict Cumberbatch star in Alan Turing biopic The Imitation Game (StudioCanal)

A new trailer for The Imitation Game starring Benedict Cumberbatch has been released ahead of its UK premiere at the London Film Festival.

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Based on a true story, Cumberbatch stars as Alan Turing, an eminent mathematics professor who is drafted in to help break the Nazi code during World War II.

Surrounded by Britain’s leading mathematical minds at Bletchley Park, Turing creates a machine – what is now known as the earliest computer – to help try and break the German Enigma machine code.

Film review: Imitation Game

Unsatisfied with code breakers who have been employed by the Government, Turing writes to Winston Churchill, who decides to put the precocious mathematician in charge of the force.

Turing recruits new minds to the operation at Bletchley Park, including Joan Clarke, a Cambridge mathematics graduate with a double first degree, played by Keira Knightley.

The trailer shows the pressures Turing is put under by MI6 to break the code as quickly as possible, and to keep his work secret.

Despite his eminent new workforce, he is still unable to crack the Enigma code with his £100,000 machine and is told by his boss Commander Denniston, played by Charles Dance, that he will be fired if he cannot do so in a month’s time.

The trailer also shows the problems Turing faces with his sexuality. After deciding to propose to Joan to keep her at Bletchley Park as an honest woman, he is seen talking to his colleague John Cairncross, played by Downton Abbey’s Allen Leech, about whether he should tell her he is a homosexual.

Matthew Goode, Mark Strong, Rory Kinnear and Matthew Beard also star in what is already being called “The British film of the year”.

The Imitation Game opens the London Film Festival on 8 October and is released in cinemas nationwide on 14 November.