Movies
Matt Smith & Imogen Poots to Star in Mystery-Thriller ‘The Salamander Lives Twice’
Matt Smith (“House of the Dragon”) and Imogen Poots (Green Room) are attached to star in the absurd mystery-thriller The Salamander Lives Twice, Deadline reports.
The project reunites director Ant Timpson and writer Toby Harvard for their third film following 2019’s Come to Daddy and 2024’s Bookworm.
Smith will star as a debonair stranger who washes ashore on a remote island wearing a Rolex and holding an briefcase he can’t open, with no memory of who he is or why he is there.
Taken in by the sole inhabitants – Iris, a glamorous wine-soaked matriarch, her erudite daughter Goggy (Poots) and Baby, their giant naked butler – he is drawn into their bizarre and decaying world.
But this is no accident. What begins as sanctuary turns into something far stranger, far darker – a world of pent-up revenge, sinister family betrayal, and shocking violence.
Emma Slade & Roxi Bull of Velvet Moss (Come to Daddy) and Andy Starke (Possessor) of Anti-Worlds will produce.
The team is eyeing a February 2027 shoot on a remote island. Embankment Films has boarded the project for sales ahead of next month’s Cannes film market.
Embankment’s Archie Faulks describes the film as “a wildly entertaining Hitchcockian thriller served up on a gourmet platter of absurdist comedy and psychological suspense. It keeps audiences guessing right up to an ending they won’t see coming and won’t forget.”
An earlier version of The Salamander Lives Twice was set to star Vera Farmiga and Adrien Brody back in 2020, but the pandemic halted that iteration.
Matt Smith in ‘Morbius’
Before updating the video nasty Faces of Death, director Daniel Goldhaber and writer Isa Mazzei explored the dangers of online life in tech-thriller Cam, their feature debut that was acquired by Netflix in 2018 after making waves on the festival circuit.
At the end of last year, the Netflix exclusive quietly departed from the streaming platform, left without another streaming home.
It’s not an isolated story; Mike Flanagan’s Hush also left streaming entirely for a period until it was finally picked up on both physical media and other streaming services.
While the tech-thriller currently isn’t available to watch on Netflix, Tubi, Hulu, or any other platforms, that’s not a problem for Cam thanks to a very cool move by Goldhaber: the director has made his breakout film accessible to watch online for free via his website.
As his site notes: “CAM is unfortunately not currently available to view on any platforms, so you can watch it here if you like :).“
No subscriptions or fees necessary, just hit play.
Cam follows Alice (Madeline Brewer), who works as an online cam girl obsessed with her ranking on the cam site. The higher her ranking goes, the more it draws unwanted attention, and Alice soon finds herself replaced on her own show with a doppelganger.
Written by Mazzei, a former camgirl, it uses the horror thriller premise to examine the life of a sex worker; Alice’s career ambition is directly at odds with the shame it brings to her family, and how she tries to spare them from it by keeping them in the dark. It only compounds her danger when the doppelganger enters the equation in Goldhaber’s engaging thriller.
For a deep dive into the treacherous world of Cam, listen to Horror Queers’ episode on it now.
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