Daniel Barber got a lot of praise for the Michael Caine vigilante flick Harry Brown in 2009, but since then he hasn’t made any more movies. That may be changing though as THR reports that he’s in talks to helm the thriller Substitution for Alcon Entertainment.
The movie is a bit of a twist of Hitchcock (which is something Hollywood will never give up on, even though decades on nobody’s been able to match the master’s skill), with shades of Strangers On A Train. The story centres on a high school student who gets mixed-up in a murder swap with a substitute teacher. Ian Shorr is responsible for the screenplay.
Barber is a solid director, but it’s going to be tough to make this seem like anything more than a generic thriller, with the word Hitchcockian being thrown around to make it seem something more grandiose.