Anna Daniels
Noomi Rapace has been wildly underserved by Hollywood, despite consistently turning out fantastic performances since her breakout role in the 2009 Swedish-language The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. After a stint in blockbuster supporting roles as the go-to global presence, Rapace has found a niche in solid, but also underseen, thrillers. Hopefully her next role in the Black List thriller O2, which is directed by Amityville: Awakening director Franck Khalfoun and produced by Crawl director Alexandre Aja, won’t meet the same fate.
Deadline reports that Noomi Rapace is set to star in O2, a thriller penned by Christie LeBlanc that made it on to the 2016 Black List. Franck Khalfoun will helm the thriller, which follows a woman who wakes up in a cryogenic medical pod with “no memory and no way out.” With her oxygen supply rapidly depleting, she must figure out how to survive.
Here is the Black List synopsis of LeBlanc’s script:
“Waking up inside a cryogenic chamber with no memory of how she got there, Charlie must somehow escape the chamber before her air runs out.”
There are a number of promising factors to this film: Rapace’s involvement, Aja (whose creature feature Crawl was an unexpected delight), and the script’s inclusion on the Black List. Founded in 2005 as a way to share the best unmade scripts in Hollywood, the annual list has become a tool to generate buzz for rising screenwriters. Acclaimed films like Juno, Looper, and The Wolf of Wall Street have all come from Black List scripts.
Now, it’s still too early to tell whether O2 will be among the greats to make it off the Black List, but Rapace has long deserved a movie that showcases her fierce talents. A claustrophobic thriller like O2, which will ostensibly only feature Rapace onscreen, could do just that. Small-space thrillers tend to be hit-or-miss, but if anyone could pull it off, it’s Rapace.
The film, which is produced by Aja as well as Echo Lake Entertainment, 42 and Wild Bunch International, is due to begin production this summer. Aja praised the film’s script, calling it, “One of the most compelling scripts I’ve read in years – a pure survival experience with a great mystery at its core. Even without the oxygen running out, the suspense on the page left me breathless.”
The project will already head to the European Film Market in Berlin next week for financier Wild Bunch International to begin selling to buyers.
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