Six years is an awfully long time for any artist to go silent, and such an absence is all the more palpable in the case of Lee Chang-dong, whose previous features (most prominently Secret Sunshine and Poetry) are considered by critics and, judging from the festival awards, his peers to be among the finest his prolific South Korea’s produced this century. Consider it a relief, then, that Chosun Media (via The Playlist) tell us Lee’s looking to begin shooting his next feature in November — “if things run smoothly,” he added as a condition.
Kang Dong-won and Yoo Ah-in, themselves some of the nation’s biggest stars, are expected to lead the mystery thriller, in which two men (one rich, one poor) become entangled with a woman. What happens from there (e.g. why it’s even a “mystery thriller) is just for us to guess right now, though the picture’s “expected to hit theaters sometime next year” — perhaps with a Cannes premiere, given the path his last two pictures took — so let’s just sit tight and, in the meantime, fill the Lee blindspots.
Meanwhile, hot off the smash success of the gripping one-location thriller Don’t Breathe, director Fede Alvarez‘s next project, Incognito, has added a new member to the team. According to THR, scribe Daniel Casey (upcoming sci-fi thriller Kin) has signed on to pen a script based on the comic book of the same name by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips. Alvarez is set to direct the thriller as his third feature — on the heels of his debut, Evil Dead, and the aforementioned Don’t Breathe — which seems to be right in his wheelhouse, at least from a genre perspective.
Incognito follows a super-villain who enters the WITSEC (witness protection program) after he flips on his boss, and is then given a drug to quell his superhero powers. Working a low-level job, the villain becomes bored with his “new life” and, when granted an opportunity to gain his full powers, must make a choice about his path in life. With this, I’d imagine, people will die bloody deaths and tension will be ratcheted. Incognito was originally published as a six-part mini-series by Marvel, and it will be interesting to see how the adaptation by Casey works on a feature-length scale.
Alvarez’s blend of hyper-violence and extreme tension should lend itself nicely to a gritty comic adaptation, where his genre sensibilities and cinematic stylings ought to shine — as they did in this summer’s Don’t Breathe. (Our review takes a slightly different stance, however.) Alvarez is assembling an interesting repertoire with a particular edge, cranking the notch up to 11 where others of his ilk may decide to scale things back. This sort of gutsy filmmaking could be just the boost a comic movie needs in a sea of more sterile, all-ages material.