A TRAILER has been released of the film which follows the true life tale of Teignmouth’s infamous sailor Donald Crowhurst.

Starring Colin Firth as Crowhurst, The Mercy goes on general release on February 9 next year.

But ahead of that, a two-minute trailer of the movie, which was mostly filmed in Teignmouth in 2015, is now available.

It has already had a preview screening in October which prompted positive reviews. 

The film follows Crowhurst’s disastrous attempts to win the 1968-69 race in his trimaran, Teignmouth Electron.

Crownhurst’s boat was ill-prepared for such a voyage, which claimed his life.

The amateur sailor the press dubbed ‘the mystery man’ never made it past the Southern Atlantic Ocean. 

Instead, he falsified his logs and reported false positions after realising that his leaking trimaran would never make it through the Southern Atlantic Ocean.

Firth said: ‘I wouldn’t dare do what he did.

‘Even to this day, what Crowhurst did is unparalleled because, although people have gone round the world and have endured all sorts, I don’t know if it’s even possible now to construct a challenge with that sort of adversity.

‘They were sailing across a frontier.’

The first trailer for the film shows Firth in character as Crowthurst, alongside Oscar-winner Rachel Weisz as his wife Clare – both pictured right.

It is ‘an extraordinary and haunting tale of a man going to sea and the family he leaves behind’, according to the film’s director, James Marsh.

Crowhurst’s life story has previously inspired an opera, several stage plays and a 2006 documentary, Deep Water, praised at the time by The Telegraph as ‘a movie which will reduce the hardest of hearts to a shipwreck’.

The Mercy is not out on general release until next year but, at a preview screening, Sir Robin Knox-Johnston, the winner of the original 1969 race, said he thought the film was ‘great’.