Paul Mescal will take to the Irish countryside… | Little White Lies

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Paul Mescal will take to the Irish coun­try­side for an A24 psychodrama

11 May 2021

Words by Charles Bramesco

Young man in swimming pool, wet hair, looking pensively.
Young man in swimming pool, wet hair, looking pensively.
Co-direc­tors Anna Rose Holmer and Saela Davis are prepar­ing a fol­low-up to 2015’s The Fits.

One of the qui­eter suc­cess sto­ries of the 2010s was The Fits, Anna Rose Holmers sur­re­al dra­ma about an 11-year-old Black girl whose social group is sud­den­ly afflict­ed by parox­ysms that may soon over­take her as well. It was a sen­sa­tion­al debut and crit­ics took notice, but a pal­try box-office return and indus­try push­back kept her out of fea­tures for the rest of the decade.

At last, she and for­mer writ­ing part­ner Saela Davis (now bumped up to co-direc­tor) are ready­ing a suit­able fol­low-up to that unsung tri­umph in the form of God’s Crea­tures, a new psy­chodra­ma. Dead­line reports that A24 will pro­duce and dis­trib­ute the film, which has already drawn a note­wor­thy pair of stars in Emi­ly Wat­son and dream­boat du jour Paul Mescal, recent­ly of TV’s Nor­mal People.

The ges­tat­ing project will whisk them away to the Irish coun­try­side, where Wat­son por­trays a moth­er who makes a deci­sion that will have rip­pling effects for her fam­i­ly and the fish­ing vil­lage where they live. She choos­es to lie on behalf of her son (that’s Mescal), and while the pre­cise nature of that lie remains a mys­tery, the Farha­di-esque vibe of trans­gres­sion and grim con­se­quence is quite encouraging.

It’s an excit­ing time for the UK art­house, and the involve­ment of pro­duc­er Fodhla Cronin O’Reilly (who recent­ly worked on Ammonite and Flo­rence Pughs break­out Lady Mac­beth) sug­gests that this could con­tin­ue that hot streak. The pro­duc­tion will be shot on loca­tion in Ire­land, with par­tic­i­pa­tion from the BBC, anoth­er transat­lantic copro­duc­tion sure to appeal to the same view­er­ship that made Nor­mal Peo­ple a sen­sa­tion in the States and Europe.

In any case, this seems like the next step on Mescal’s path to out­grow­ing the small screen and rein­tro­duc­ing him­self as a movie star, a move that has already paired him with Mag­gie Gyl­len­hall for her next direc­to­r­i­al effort. The Ansel Elgo­rts of the world had best watch their backs.

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