With the likes of In The Company Of Men and Your Friends & Neighbours, Neil Labute became one of the most lauded writer-directors around. However in recent years he’s seemed determined to throw that reputation away with dreck like the remakes of The Wicker Man and Death At A Funeral. Perhaps he needed the cash, but it’s still no excuse for what he produced.
Hopefully though things will get better with Crooked House, an adaptation of Agatha Christie’s novel, which Labute is attached to helm from a script by Julian Fellowes (now Lord Julian Fellowes) and Tim Rose Price. The cast is also coming together, with Julie Andrews, Gemma Arterton, Matthew Goode, and Gabriel Byrne all signed up to star (although there’s no news on the parts they’ll play), according to Variety.
Christie’s novel, unsurprisingly, is a murder-mystery, centring on the death of an elderly man, Aristide Leonides, who was poisoned with his own eye medicine. Charles Hayward travels to the Leonides crooked mansion and begins looking into the death, which nearly all the family seems to have motive for, largely because of the substantial inheritance each of them supposed they’d receive. With three generations of Leonides all having possibly killed the old man, it becomes increasingly difficult to work out who actually did it.
Labute says “The story has a couple of fresh sides to it that I didn’t remember from Christie’s work. There’s a love story, which didn’t feature strongly in many of her books, so that seemed very different to me and fresh. Plus it’s quite morally ambiguous, which also appealed to me.”
The $20 million movie will shoot this summer.