In my world, this is wonderful news.
Alice Rohrwacher, one of the best international filmmakers currently working, is set to helm an adaptation of Audrey Niffenegger’s bestselling novel “Three Incestuous Sisters,” with Ottessa Moshfegh co-writing the script with her.
Not just that: the cast is incredible—filled with talent. How about Dakota Johnson, Saoirse Ronan, Jessie Buckley, and Josh O’Connor? Principal photography is set to begin in April.
The film is only loosely based on the book, with actual plot details being kept under wraps.
Now, is this the silent film Rohrwacher has been teasing for well over a year? That’s the main question I have—or perhaps she pivoted ahead to a whole other project while that one remains in development. We’ll gather more details and update you soon.
Silent cinema might line up with what “Three Incestuous Sisters,” the book, is about. The book presents a series of eerie, black-and-white illustrations paired with short captions that follow three sisters who live in total isolation, cut off from society and from normal emotional development. Their extreme closeness becomes unhealthy.
Yeah, this might be her silent film.
Rohrwacher, whose “Happy as Lazzaro” (2018) made good on the enormous promise of her earlier work, has always made films that blur boundaries—between time periods, between realism and myth, between the visible and the unseen. In 2024, “La Chimera,” starring O’Connor, came out in the U.S., a year after competing for the Palme d’Or, and it was her best work yet—filled with dreamlike ambiguity and narrative shapeshifting.
Festival press conferences have turned into landmines of political questioning, to the point where some artists would probably prefer to turn down being a juror at Cannes, Venice, or Berlin.