Although he delivered quite a memorable performance as a director in Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir series, it’s been a decade since Richard Ayoade actually last directed a film. Following 2010’s Submarine and 2013’s The Double, he’s now finally returning with a new feature and the first details have been unveiled.
Deadline reports Ayoade will direct, star in, and has co-written with George Saunders an adaptation of his New Yorker short The Semplica Girl Diaries. Also starring Ayoade’s wife Lydia Fox, with Ben Stiller, Jesse Eisenberg, and Sally Hawkins in talks to join the ensemble, the 2012 short story follows a suburban father who buys an elite status symbol outdoor decoration called Semplica Girls. It’s then revealed these “decorations” are actually poor young women from other countries.
See the full synopsis below for the project that will be sold by Cornerstone Films at EFM.
Family man Lloyd Turner (Ayoade) is facing up to his 40th birthday with the prospect of a new decade mouldering in debt and mediocrity. After attending yet another party hosted by the rich parents of his daughter’s friend, and in a bid to give his daughters the happiness he thinks they deserve, Lloyd and his wife Sarah (Fox) makes the financially crippling decision to invest in what has become the elite’s new favourite status symbol: a set of ‘Semplica Girls’ to decorate their front lawn. Yet when Lloyd’s youngest daughter, Ida, discovers what’s happening in her name, on her very own doorstep, she threatens to plunge her family into a chaos deeper than they’ve ever known…