Last fall, director Karyn Kusama (“Jennifer’s Body”) announced she would be working on a David Cronenberg-esque “body horror movie” starring actress Rachel Weisz.
While Kusama started out promisingly with “Girl Fight” and then not-so-promisingly with “Æon Flux” and the aforementioned Diablo Cody-penned teen horror starring Megan Fox, the idea of an old-school body horror pic in the vein of Cronenberg is definitely an intriguing concept.
Chatter about the film has been mostly non-existent, but speaking to MTV, Weisz delivered some details and the film’s actual title, which is also being called an indie thriller.
Dubbed “The Invisible X,” Weisz said she will play, “two characters, or essentially two halves of the same character, but she is both male and female,” she said. “It’s actually about a man who turns into a woman. It’s an amazing script.”
However amazing or not, the project has evidently been a long-gestating one, and apparently it has been eight years in the making and the project is still awaiting to secure funding. It’s essentially the same old story. It’s a difficult indie pitch and in this timid film climate, it’s not going to get any easier.
“It’s something we’ve talked about doing but there are no immediate plans for it,” Weisz cautioned. “These independent films can take a long time to get together. It’s almost impossible to make things now that aren’t genre pictures.”
Apparently Kusama is working on a rewrite of the picture and while we do have major problems with her last two pictures we’re heartened by the fact that she credits Cronenberg as one of her directing idols.
Weisz, who can soon be seen in this summer’s pretty snoozy swords and sandals epic, “Agora” — though she herself is quite great in it — could use an opportunity to really flex her acting muscles and this could be the gig. That is if it ever happens.
While we might be jumping the gun here, can we at least be partially excited that an original thriller, written and directed by a female, is even still in the works? With the recent failures of remakes of campy horror trilogies from the 1980’s flailing at the box office and fans wanting to know where the psycho-thrillers went, it would be excited to see a complex and pseudo-sexual thriller with compelling character development. Here’s hoping anyhow.