Possession remake casts Madeline Brewer, Emory Cohen and Nicholas Alexander Chavez
Smile director Parker Finn’s Possession remake has quietly lined up three more cast members.
If you thought Hollywood had run out of cult horror classics to remake, think again. Parker Finn (the bloke who turned Smile into a money-printing horror machine) is now mounting his own version of Possession, the twisted 1981 shocker that’s about as far from a safe studio play as you can get. And yes, Finn’s just lined up three more rising names for the cast, helping to flesh out what’s looking like a surprisingly punchy ensemble.
The ever-expanding cast
The fresh faces jumping on board are Madeline Brewer (most familiar from The Handmaid’s Tale), Emory Cohen (recently in something called Marty Supreme with Timothée Chalamet), and Nicholas Alexander Chavez (who had a run as Lyle Menendez in Ryan Murphy’s crime series, and popped up again in Murphy’s Grotesquerie). They’ll be joining the already-announced Margaret Qualley, Callum Turner, Paul Dano and Diego Calva.
Robert Pattinson is producing this remake of Possession.
At this point, the only thing more crowded than the cast list is probably the group chat.
What they're remaking (and why it’s a big deal)
The original Possession, directed by Andrzej Żuławski, isn’t your standard horror fare—it’s a Cold War fever dream set in West Berlin tracking a married couple (Sam Neill and Isabelle Adjani) as their divorce devolves into paranoia, infidelity, shape-shifting monstrosities, and a general sense that someone’s spiked your coffee with something hallucinogenic. Adjani didn’t just star—she won Best Actress at Cannes for what many still call one of the most unhinged (and, frankly, mesmerising) performances ever captured on film. The plot for Finn’s remake hasn’t been released, but all expectations are that it’ll at least borrow the marriage-collapsing-into-horror business of the original.
Behind the scenes
Finn’s not just in the director’s chair—he’s written the script and will produce, along with his partner Jonathan Fass for their Bad Feeling shingle. Roy Lee and Andrew Childs (they’re the types who make genre money move at Vertigo Entertainment) are also in, as is, oddly enough, Robert Pattinson himself as a producer. There’s another exec producer, Marc Bienstock, but let’s be real, the major names are what have horror fans doing double-takes here.
The divisive reaction
Let’s not sugar-coat it—this remake is already causing aggro in horror circles. Żuławski’s original was deeply personal (he was going through a rough divorce and fresh off being exiled from Poland), so loads of diehards reckon you can’t bottle lightning twice. Isabelle Adjani herself, though, says she’s fine with it—in fact, she told Cannes crowds earlier this year she’s given Margaret Qualley her blessing to step into the role that made her name, calling her an 'incredibly talented actress' and getting why a new batch of filmmakers would want to go at the material. Of course, not everyone’s so sanguine—one critic from JoBlo pointed out the original’s specific Cold War paranoia and fever-pitch ending as things modern Hollywood is unlikely to recapture, at least not without sanding down the edges.