Maya Hawke has found her next film role. She will star in The Confessions alongside Alexander Skarsgård, Hunter Schafer and Harry Melling, the new feature from Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin and his co-directors Galen Johnson and Evan Johnson, with Ari Aster producing through Square Peg, the company he runs with Lars Knudsen.
Variety, which reported the casting in an exclusive on Tuesday, describes The Confessions as a cautionary psycho-dramedy. In it, a group of condemned nuns bears witness to an accursed, globe-spanning love triangle involving a missing sea captain and his poet wife. Which roles the four stars will play has not been announced. The filmmakers described their own movie in an eccentric statement as “part religio-maritime rough-music psychomachy, part hallucinated saltwater shaming parade.”
The film is the trio’s follow-up to Rumours, their absurdist political satire that premiered at Cannes in 2024, with Cate Blanchett, Alicia Vikander and Charles Dance playing world leaders who get lost in the woods during a G7 summit. Aster did not hide his enthusiasm for working with them again. “I have long been a devoted fan of the great Canadian wizard, Guy Maddin, and his equally brilliant partners, Evan and Galen Johnson,” he said. “They stand humongously tall among my favorite filmmakers in the world, and The Confessions is as singular and beguiling as anything they’ve ever written.”
Square Peg is producing the film in the U.S. alongside Canada’s Scythia Films and Thin Stuff, with support from Telefilm Canada. The project launched to buyers this week at the AFM, where CAA Media Finance and WME Independent are co-representing the North American rights and the French company Charades is handling international sales. Elevation Pictures will distribute the film in Canada. Filming dates and a U.S. distributor have not been announced yet. The film also brings Skarsgård and Melling back together after the two recently shared the screen in Pillion.
It is the latest addition to a busy run for Hawke, who plays Wiress in The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping, arriving in theaters on November 20. Earlier this week, she talked about how Jennifer Lawrence’s Katniss Everdeen first made her want to act. For now, The Confessions remains one of the more intriguing projects on the market: roles, filming dates and a U.S. home are all still to come.