Before 2024's "Rumours," Guy Maddin, the great Canadian surrealist, hadn't shot a feature in more than seven years. Now, two years after that film premiered at Cannes, he already has his next one lined up, and it has quite a cast.
Per Variety, Alexander Skarsgård, Hunter Schafer, Maya Hawke and Harry Melling will star in Maddin's "The Confessions."
Maddin is co-directing again with Evan and Galen Johnson, the brothers who co-wrote and co-directed "Rumours" with him. Ari Aster and Lars Knudsen's Square Peg is producing. Aster is excited. In a statement, he says the new script is "as singular and beguiling as anything they've ever written."
The film is being called a "cautionary psycho-dramedy." The logline is pure Maddin: a group of condemned nuns witnesses the cursed, globe-spanning love triangle between a missing sea captain and his poet wife. The filmmakers describe it as "part religio-maritime rough-music psychomachy, part hallucinated saltwater shaming parade." I have no idea what that means, and I can't wait to find out.
Skarsgård and Melling are fresh off "Pillion," so this reunites them. Nobody has said yet who plays whom, and there's no start date for the shoot.
Maddin is such a unique voice in cinema, an ultra-surrealist who tends to shoot his films like they're lost silent-era reels. Nobody else makes movies that look or feel like his, which is why, as playful and entertaining as it was, "Rumours" semi-disappointed me in how conventional it felt (by his standards, of course).
When I reviewed "Rumours" out of Cannes, I called it Maddin's goofiest, most mainstream film. It was fun, but nowhere near "My Winnipeg." With nuns, a lost sea captain and a poet's wife, "The Confessions" sounds like a step back toward the strange, dreamlike Maddin of "The Forbidden Room" and "The Saddest Music in the World." That's very good news.
Kushner has been Spielberg's go-to screenwriter for two decades now: "Munich," "Lincoln," "West Side Story" and "The Fabelmans." All four were Best Picture nominees.