Dar­ren Aronofsky’s next film stars Bren­dan Fras­er as an obese recluse

It’s been a while since Dar­ren Aronof­sky​‘s last fea­ture, the hec­tic sym­bol­ist para­ble moth­er!, came to the­aters and col­lect­ed an F Cin­e­maS­core for bring­ing its dense oblique­ness to mall cine­plex­es. That was 2017, and now the idio­syn­crat­ic auteur has announced his fol­low-up fea­ture project, anoth­er exer­cise in the extreme and abstract.

Dis­cussing­Film broke the news that Aronof­sky will direct a screen adap­ta­tion of Samuel D Hunter’s play ​‘The Whale’ for a release with A24. And for his star, one required to push them­selves to the lim­its of what the human body can with­stand, he’s tapped the daunt­less Bren­dan Fras­er.

Fras­er will por­tray a six-hun­dred pound recluse liv­ing on the out­skirts of ​“Mor­mon Coun­try” in Ida­ho, a depressed wretch who has decid­ed to eat him­self to death. Before he shuf­fles off the old mor­tal coil, he decides to reach out to his estranged daugh­ter, and finds that her per­son­al­i­ty has cur­dled into unhap­pi­ness and vicious­ness. (Hunter reworked his own script for the screenplay.)

The obvi­ous ques­tion is how Fras­er will phys­i­cal­ly inhab­it the form of a man sev­er­al times his pre­sum­able cur­rent weight, whether it shall be with the aid of CGI or a Klumps-style body­suit. The oth­er is how Aronof­sky will man­age mate­r­i­al that cer­tain­ly sounds pred­i­cat­ed on a hor­ri­fied atti­tude towards hefti­er body types, though that’ll all be in the details of a film sure­ly traf­fick­ing in metaphor.

The vague plot out­line gives the impres­sion of a unique­ly mis­er­able entry in the fil­mog­ra­phy of the man who brought us Requiem for a Dream, but as The Film Stage notes, the play’s descrip­tion at Play­wrights Hori­zons uses the words ​“big-heart­ed and fierce­ly fun­ny.” What’s not fun­ny about expir­ing suf­fo­cat­ed in your own filth? What’s not fun­ny about Idaho?