Carrie-Anne Moss has joined the cast of Replacer, a psychosexual horror film written by and starring Halsey and directed by Avan Jogia, Deadline reports. The headline that has set fandom twitching, though, is in the credits. Lilly Wachowski is an executive producer, which means Trinity and one of the two people who invented her are back on the same call sheet, more or less, for the first time since the original Matrix trilogy as far as we can tell. Lilly sat out The Matrix Resurrections, so this is a reunion in the way a Christmas card from an old flatmate is a reunion. People are excited anyway, and fair enough.
The film itself sounds like it was assembled from the parts bin of a very good late-night video shop. Halsey plays Proxy, a troubled DJ stranded in Montreal, who falls in with an alluring artist and his friends, who run an underground radio station. Their broadcasts start to warp under the influence of a mysterious signal coming from deep beneath the city’s Métro, and Proxy has to get out before the sound turns her and her new friends into something “raw, primal, and unrecognizable”. Anyone raised on Videodrome, Pontypool or Adrienne Barbeau’s fog-bound lighthouse broadcasts in The Fog will know the rule: in horror, the late-night radio slot is never a career move.
Wachowski certainly knows the references. She has described the script as a “surreal hyper-dive” and reckons Jogia was raised on David Cronenberg, Alex Cox, Tony Scott and John Carpenter, which is a fine diet for a horror director, if a little low in fibre. Jogia, who has acted in Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City and Zombieland: Double Tap, calls it “a bright and electric club horror” with a romance at its centre, and offers the slogan “Come together. Leave as one.” That reads like a cult recruitment flyer, which, given the plot, may be the point.
Halsey, last seen in Ti West’s MaXXXine, is in her first leading film role. The rest of the cast includes Karl Glusman (The Neon Demon), Juliette Gariépy (Red Rooms), Antoine Olivier Pilon and Landon Liboiron. Alex Ridha, better known as the electronic producer Boys Noize, is scoring it, which is sensible for a film where the soundtrack is quite possibly the monster. Production has already wrapped in Montreal.
What we don’t know is who Moss is playing, or when anybody will get to see it. There’s no release date and no distributor named yet. She’s in a busy horror patch at the moment, currently starring in the folk-horror series Yaga, and she has never needed much screen time to steal a film; ask anyone who has watched the first six minutes of The Matrix. Here at SFcrowsnest we’d happily take a film about a cursed signal under Montreal on its own merits. Adding the woman who once ran up a wall in a PVC catsuit to escape some men from the government only improves the frequency.
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