Kyle Gallner has officially signed on to join Brie Larson in Skeletons, the upcoming creature feature from director JT Mollner and producer J.J. Abrams. This reunites Gallner with Mollner for the first time since Strange Darling, and if you spent any part of 2024 trying to explain that film to everyone who had not seen it yet, this one is already on your list.
Sony Pictures picked up worldwide rights at the European Film Market earlier this year in a deal landing north of $25 million before a single day of filming. The screenplay comes from Brian Duffield, based on a short story by Philip Fracassi, with revisions from Mollner.
Brian Duffield Is Involved and That Matters
If you have seen No One Will Save You, you already know why that name matters. Duffield wrote and directed that 2023 Hulu thriller, a film that runs almost entirely without dialogue and somehow still makes you feel completely trapped inside it. He is very good at building a story around one person inside something awful and making you feel it in your chest. Bringing him onto a creature feature told from a child’s perspective is a specific choice, and it is the right one.
What gets overlooked in that conversation is that Duffield has already written a creature feature. Underwater in 2020, Kristen Stewart on the ocean floor with something enormous in the dark. It was better than it got credit for, and Duffield’s instinct there, to build the horror around what the characters cannot see rather than what they can, is the same instinct that makes him the right person to write a monster story filtered through a child who does not understand what he is watching. Children are the original unreliable narrators. They fill the gaps with what they know, and what they know is almost never enough.
The Source Material Is Not an Accident
The script is based on a short story called Fail-Safe by Philip Fracassi, a Stoker-nominated author whose work has been quietly accumulating serious Hollywood attention. A24 is also adapting his story Altar. His collection Behold the Void was named best collection of the year by This Is Horror. His novel Boys in the Valley is the kind of book horror readers press into each other’s hands without saying much. He is not an unknown quantity, and his material is not being picked up by accident.
The original short story title, Fail-Safe, is worth sitting with for a second. In the context of this plot, a child building his entire understanding of the world around two people, one of whom turns out to be something other than human, it lands differently once you know what the story is. A fail-safe is the thing you trust to hold when everything else breaks. This film is about what happens when that thing is the problem.
Duffield adapting Fracassi, with Mollner revising, is a specific assembly of people who all seem to understand what kind of horror actually works and why.
What the Film Is
Skeletons is told from the perspective of a young boy who slowly begins to figure out that something is wrong with his mother. Not wrong like she forgot to pick him up from school. Wrong like she is not exactly what he thought she was.
Larson is playing the mother. The casting makes a disturbing amount of sense. She is extraordinarily good at the specific trick a role like this requires, making you care about someone while quietly planting the idea that maybe you should not. She knows how to play love and danger in the same breath.
Gallner’s role has not been detailed yet. He is in it though. What he did in Strange Darling showed a performer who can hold a character’s damage at a controlled distance until the moment it is not controlled anymore, and that kind of precision is exactly what this kind of film rewards. After Strange Darling, that is enough.
Sony paid $25 million worldwide for this out of EFM. That is not a number you pay for something you plan to quietly dump.
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