If we were making a list of horror movies ripe for a good remaking, you’d have to scroll pretty damn far before you got anywhere close to Andrzej Zulawski‘s 1981 nightmare vision of a dissolving marriage, Possession. Starring Sam Neill and Isabelle Adjani, the psychological horror film is so fundamentally rooted in the Polish director’s very specific, deliberately messy mindset—awash in thoughts about love, sex, Cold War-era politics, national identity, and more—as to be almost impossible to imagine being filtered through any other creator’s viewpoint. And that’s to say nothing of the daunting question of who you’d try to cast, especially in Adjani’s complicated role as a ballet instructor who seems to be coming apart at the seams.
Nevertheless: Bloody Disgusting reports that Margaret Qualley and Masters Of The Air star Callum Turner have apparently been cast in Smile director Parker Finn’s remake of Zulawski’s film. Admittedly, they seem to have come across this information in a somewhat unconventional way: A Vanity Fair article on a little mini-movie Paramount shot for itself to show off to distributors at CinemaCon last week, and which apparently included a quick shot of Finn, Qualley, and Turner happily hanging out together, no monstrous doppelgangers in tow. (We previously reported on the remake back in June of 2024, as it happens; Robert Pattinson was attached to produce at the time, but there’s no further word of his involvement at the moment.)
Turner seems perfectly serviceable in the film’s “protagonist” role; Neill spends a decent chunk of the original movie simply being baffled or worried by the chaos erupting around him, so the former Fantastic Beasts survivor should slot in reasonably well. The bigger point of interest is Qualley, who’s still relatively fresh off playing with similar loaded metaphors for identity, sexuality, and duality in The Substance; it’ll be genuinely interesting to see what she can do with this material, especially the famous three-minute sequence in which Adjani has a full-body breakdown in the middle of a subway station.
(The biggest question mark, of course is Finn, plus the basic worries attendant to the idea of a studio remake of a highly personal horror movie; the Smile director has proven he can put some very fucked up images on a screen, but it’s hard to imagine Paramount being fully on board with letting him get quite as exultantly, deliberately incoherent as Zulawski’s film ultimately gets.)
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