Benh Zeitlin Returns! Set to Direct ‘Hold On To Your Angels,’ With Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal

Benh Zeitlin triumphed 14 years ago with “Beasts of the Southern Wild.” It went on to get nominated for Best Picture and set Zeitlin up as a possible heir to Terrence Malick’s brand of naturalist cinema.

Zeitlin’s much-anticipated follow-up was “Wendy,” released in 2020, a very loose adaptation of “Peter Pan,” but infused with the same magical-surrealism as “Beasts.” Suffice to say, it was a mess, to the point where I truly thought he would not be able to make another film again.

Hey, look at that—Zeitlin is back. He somehow managed to convince “Hamnet” duo Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal to star in “Hold On To Your Angels,” a new feature Zeitlin wrote and plans to direct (via Deadline).

Set in a decaying bayou landscape on the edge of South Louisiana, “Hold On To Your Angels” is described as a catastrophic outlaw romance. It follows a “hell-bound outlaw” (Mescal) and a “ferocious shepherd of lost souls” (Buckley) whose intense love unfolds against the collapse of their fragile world.

Zeitlin has called it his “most impossible love story,” framing it as both a tribute to a vanishing way of life and a broader plea for empathy in a fractured world, echoing thematic threads from his earlier work like “Beasts of the Southern Wild.”

The film is being produced by Plan B alongside indie superproducer Alex Coco (“Anora,” “Moonlight”). The project is set to be introduced to buyers at this month’s Cannes market, with production currently scheduled to begin in February.

I sure hope this is better than “Wendy.” The delays around that film came down to a mix of ambitious filmmaking and difficult production realities, but also what I like to describe as a bad case of “Malickitis”: a tendency toward improvisational shooting, and extensive post-production reshaping.

Following the success of “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” Zeitlin leaned further into that experimental structure and tonal fluidity on “Wendy,” which led to three years of editing as he searched for the right shape for the film. The expectations were also extremely high, shaped by the triumph of “Beasts.” I truly hope he finds his mojo on this next film, which—don’t be surprised—might take many years in the edit room.