Housing in America is becoming a huge issue, with astronomical housing prices beginning to eliminate a generation of potential home buyers. Monthly rents are soaring; it’s a real-life issue ripe for dramatic exploration in both features and television. Deadline reports that a new film set in Portland based on the novel “The Night Always Comes,” written Willy Vlautin, is in the works and will explore some of those grim housing/debt issues. The drama has landed British actress Vanessa Kirby (“Napoleon”) in the lead role and will see her reunite with director Benjamin Caron after the two previously worked on “The Crown” together. Netflix has acquired the pic, and it will start production this May on location in Portland.
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Kirby will play Lynette, a working-class woman in Portland, Oregon, who attempts a 24-hour quest to call in old debts and raise enough money to keep a roof over her head along with her mother and developmentally disabled brother. The story turns darker as events push Lynette into risky money-gathering ventures to secure her housing situation.
Here is the official synopsis for the original book via Amazon:
Barely thirty, Lynette is exhausted. Saddled with bad credit and juggling multiple jobs, some illegally, she’s been diligently working to buy the house she lives in with her mother and developmentally disabled brother Kenny. Portland’s housing prices have nearly quadrupled in fifteen years, and the owner is giving them a good deal. Lynette knows it’s their last best chance to own their own home—and obtain the security they’ve never had. While she has enough for the down payment, she needs her mother to cover the rest of the asking price. But a week before they’re set to sign the loan papers, her mother gets cold feet and reneges on her promise, pushing Lynette to her limits to find the money they need. Set over two days and two nights, ‘The Night Always Comes’ follows Lynette’s frantic search—an odyssey of hope and anguish that will bring her face to face with greedy rich men and ambitious hustlers, those benefiting and those left behind by a city in the throes of a transformative boom. As her desperation builds and her pleas for help go unanswered, Lynette makes a dangerous choice that sets her on a precarious, frenzied spiral. In trying to save her family’s future, she is plunged into the darkness of her past and forced to confront the reality of her life.
The project will be shot before Marvel Studios call up Kirby to play Sue Storm, aka The Invisible Woman, in Matt Shakman’s (“WandaVision”) reboot of “The Fantastic Four,” which is said to be shooting over the summer.
If you’re familiar with his other work, Caron was part of the directing team behind the first season of Tony Gilory’s “Andor” series, which focused on the origin of Diego Luna’s Cassian Andor from “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.” He also previously helmed the A24/Apple film “Sharper.”