Daisy Ridley has signed on to star in a sci-fi thriller titled Mind Fall that will be directed by acclaimed French filmmaker Mathieu Kassovitz (La Haine) with a script written by Graham Moore (The Imitation Game).
The movie is set in a near-future London where, through the use of illegal technology, people are able to remove memories from someone’s mind and implant them into another. These “mems” (not memes) have become the hottest drug on the black market, with people willing to pay hefty sums to bind memories to themselves, making it indistinguishable between events they themselves lived and what they implanted.
Ridley will play Ardis Varnado, a top mems trafficker who’s also a struggling addict frequently getting high on her own supply. When she’s accused of murdering one of her clients, she sets out to uncover what truly happened and clear her name. But doing so forces her to face her own jumbling memory, not knowing which are actually hers and which are implants.
That’s a pretty exciting premise, with shades of Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, Strange Days, and Blade Runner 2049 coming to mind.
Any project that can evoke those movies should get cinephiles pretty excited, and the combination of Ridley directed by Kassovitz – La Haine is often in conversation as the greatest French film of all time – is equally mouth-watering.
The film was previously being set up at Solstice Studios, but after laying off top executives earlier this month, the studio seems to be shutting down. Instead, the film is being produced by Jeff Robinov and John Graham of Studio 8, while Vincent Maraval and Kim Fox are now leading the buyer discussions for Wild Bunch International.
Ridley is still working out her post-Star Wars career, but choosing to work with good directors is a smart move, even though this will be Kassovitz’s first time behind the camera in a decade. The other project Ridley has in the works is Neil Burger‘s The Marsh King’s Daughter, which is currently in post-production.
Mind Fall is still being sold to studios, so there’s no release info yet, but with Ridley attached to that premise, it shouldn’t have much of a problem finding a buyer. There’s no doubt that we’ll hear plenty more about the film over the next year.
#Peace.Love.MindFall
