Robert Zemeckis, M. Night Shyamalan, Nicolas Winding Refn, and Radu Jude Set Up New Projects

Directing the best American film of 2024 that’s also the uber-rare piece of experimental art to screen in multiplexes and––you know where this is headed––massive box-office bomb would typically spell the end of a director’s career. It’s to his fortune and ours alike that Robert Zemeckis’ well never quite runs dry, ergo: Deadline reports he’s set to direct Jennifer Lopez in the Netflix thriller The Last Mrs. Parrish, an adaptation of Liv Constantine’s novel that’ll be scripted by John Gatins (Flight) and Andrea Berloff (Straight Outta Compton).

Early comparisons to What Lies Beneath and Allied match with a description of said novel, which concerns a con artist (Lopez) who targets a wealthy couple, the Parrishes, “by befriending the wife and seducing the husband, with the master plan of becoming the next Mrs. Parrish, only to discover that the wife’s life is far more complicated than she could have imagined.” I anticipate a masterful modulation of tone, camera trickery that combines classic optical effects with new technology nobody’s quite yet mastered, and shortsighted reviews.

Speaking of which: M. Night Shyamalan’s next feature has a title and premise. First announced as an unusual collaboration with weepie titan Nicolas Sparks––whereby the two formulated an idea one independent develops into a film, the other a novel––the film is titled Remain and concerns Tate Donovan (Jake Gyllenhaal), a depressed New York-based architect who’s been discharged from a psychiatric facility and, while in Cape Cod, meets Wren (Phoebe Dynevor), “a young woman who makes him challenge everything he knows about his logical and controlled world.” With the novel arriving October 7 and Warner Bros. set to distribute the feature, one might expect cameras to roll shortly. [People]

Just when he’s needed most, Nicolas Winding Refn returns. It just makes sense that his first theatrical feature since the company’s inception would be with Neon, who will distribute Her Private Hell––only described thus far as “something groovy” with a cast list featuring Sophie Thatcher, Charles Melton, Kristine Froseth, Havana Rose Liu.

Winding Refn being a massive dork (compliment), it might be significant that the title’s shared by exactly the kind of film his byNWR imprint would restore: Norman J. Warren’s 1968 feature concerning “a young Italian girl [who] comes to London and is tricked into posing nude for risqué magazines.” The predatory relationship between men and women is nothing new for the great Dane, nor (as in his alternately mesmerizing and irresponsible Too Old to Die Young) is a depiction of pornographers. I’ll put money down on that being the source for this new film, though if I’ve learned anything from Winding Refn’s cinema (I haven’t, but if) it’s that one errant decision could spell my doom.

Finally, Radu Jude’s ceaseless streak continues apace with a spin on Octave Mirbeau’s oft-adapted The Diary of a Chambermaid. In his version, to be produced by Saïd Ben Saïd, a young Romanian woman travels to France “to work for a French family and who also joins an amateur theatre company who are working on an adaptation” of Mirbeau’s novel. While there’s no word on when production starts, Jude’s production speed suggests it won’t sit dormant long.

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