Scarlett Johansson is heading into the twilight zone of Ari Aster’s auteur weirdness. After “Eddington” pushed the filmmaker’s anxieties into the heat of COVID-era America, Aster has set his next film, “Scapegoat,” with Johansson attached to star and A24 once again backing the project. Plot details are being kept under wraps, which is fairly standard operating procedure for Aster, whose films tend to reveal their real shape only after the trap has already closed.
READ MORE: Ari Aster On ‘Eddington,’ Polarization, and Finding Clarity In Chaos [Interview]
Aster wrote the original screenplay and will direct, with Lars Knudsen producing through Square Peg, according to Deadline. The project continues Aster’s long-running relationship with A24, which has released his feature work from “Hereditary” and “Midsommar” through “Beau Is Afraid” and last year’s “Eddington.”
For Johansson, it marks another auteur-driven swing in a crowded stretch. She starred last year in “Jurassic World Rebirth” and “The Phoenician Scheme,” is currently filming Mike Flanagan’s new “The Exorcist” film for Universal, and will next be seen in James Gray’s “Paper Tiger,” which heads to Cannes with Adam Driver and Miles Teller. She has cast opposite Robert Pattinson in “The Batman: Part II,” in an unknown role, which is expected to begin production this summer.
Aster, meanwhile, remains one of A24’s defining contemporary filmmakers, even as his work has grown stranger, longer, and more polarizing. “Eddington,” starring Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal, centered on a standoff between a small-town sheriff and mayor in May 2020, with A24 describing the conflict as a powder keg that turns neighbor against neighbor in Eddington, New Mexico.
That film followed the three-hour anxiety horror epic “Beau Is Afraid,” which moved Aster further from the tightly wound horror of “Hereditary” and the sunlit folk nightmare of “Midsommar.” Whatever “Scapegoat” turns out to be, the title alone suggests Aster has not exactly left punishment, paranoia, guilt, and social violence behind.
The Johansson casting is the immediate charge here. Her recent work has moved between franchise scale, formal comedy, and filmmaker-led dramas, and “Scapegoat” gives her a chance to step into one of the more combustible sensibilities currently working inside the studio-indie lane.
No production start date or release date has been announced. For now, the key details are enough: Aster has picked his next original feature, A24 is back in business with him, and Johansson is set to lead a project whose secrecy is already baked into the premise.
Rodrigo Perez is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Playlist, which he launched in 2008. He has worked in entertainment journalism since 2000, including at MTV, and has written for SPIN, IndieWire, Pitchfork, Complex, Magnet, and various music, film, and entertainment publications over the past two decades.
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