If Martin Scorsese’s next feature is, as advertised, a “ghost story,” it’s also starting to look like one of those all-killer ensemble summons where the atmosphere comes baked in. Mads Mikkelsen has now closed a deal to join Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence in “What Happens at Night,” a project set up at Apple Original Films in partnership with StudioCanal, with Patricia Clarkson also on board.
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The film is based on the novel by Peter Cameron, a dreamlike, unsettling riff on a couple’s attempt to adopt a child in a remote, snowbound European locale—one that keeps tightening as the wife’s cancer worsens and the husband worries the illness will jeopardize the adoption. They wind up in a vast hotel that feels both cavernous and curiously inhabited, surrounded by eccentric figures that don’t quite read as comforting fellow travelers.
That tone—part psychological dread, part liminal travel nightmare—makes Mikkelsen an especially sharp fit, even if the reporting hasn’t disclosed who he’s playing. The casting is the latest signal that Scorsese is leaning into a different register here: less outwardly operatic crime mechanics, more inwardly destabilizing mood, where a “simple” trip becomes a pressure chamber and the people you meet start to feel like symptoms.
On the ground, the production appears to be moving quickly. The Prague Reporter reports that Scorsese has arrived in Prague ahead of an expected start of filming, with local registration suggesting formal preparations are underway; the site also notes that some location work is scheduled in Prague’s city center in March. The same report lists the project as backed by Apple in partnership with StudioCanal and produced through Scorsese’s Sikelia Productions, with Patrick Marber adapting the screenplay, and Rodrigo Prieto expected to reteam with the director behind the camera.
Taken together, the signals suggest this is not one of Scorsese’s more distant, theoretical projects but an active production coming into focus. The combination of DiCaprio, Lawrence, and now Mikkelsen points toward something tonally distinct within Scorsese’s filmography — less driven by external spectacle and more by mood, interior tension, and existential unease.
No release date has been announced, but presumably this one will arrive in 2026.
