After years of directing better-than-average independent sleeper thrillers – except for 2010’s misstep Vanishing on 7th Street – Brad Anderson had a bit of a hit on his hands with The Call, which has earned $40 million in just over two weeks with just a $13 million budget. Lest one thought he’d be going for something more commercial, Anderson isn’t that kind of a guy.
His latest project, the psychological thriller Eliza Graves, just added Jim Sturgess to its cast, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Sturgess has been on a sci-fi run as of late, with Juan Solanas’ Upside Down and the Wachowski’s Cloud Atlas as his latest projects to hit theaters, and audiences will next see him in Mat Whitecross’ thriller Ashes and Giuseppe Tornatore’s romantic drama The Best Offer, as well as the just-finished crime biopic Electric Slide.
In this loose adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s early short story “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether,” – and why they aren’t using that original title is beyond us – Sturgess will star opposite Kate Beckinsale as a Harvard Medical School graduate working in a mental institution in which the inmates are posing as doctors and have taken over the hospital. He slowly becomes infatuated with the lead character Eliza, played by Beckinsale. Joe Gangemi, who co-wrote the pretty decent 2007 horror Wind Chill penned the screenplay.
It already sounds a hell of a lot better than James McTeigue’s The Raven, as far as Poe-inspired projects are concerned. Eliza Graves, a Nu Image/Millennium production, is scheduled to begin filming in Bulgaria on June 21.
