Though he recently shot Bugonia and has long been attached to adapt perpetual subway read My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Yorgos Lanthimos has kept at least one other project deep in the background: from trusted sources we’ve confirmed he’ll write and direct Fatale, an adaptation of Jean-Patrick Manchette’s short and severe assassin thriller with James Schamus aboard as producer.

Fatale is no small property, and those who’ve had the fortune of reading Manchette’s novel can imagine how and why its design so appeals to Lanthimos. It opens on Aimée, an assassin introduced handily dispatching armed hunters and deliriously, near-orgasmically showering in the money awarded for such while traveling to a port town where she engineers, Red Harvest-style, resentments among its ruling class, culminating in a savage showdown. Social satire, unflinching violence, sexual mania––all familiar tenets of Lanthimos’ cinema, with a role one needn’t stretch much to imagine inhabited by Emma Stone.

When Fatale emerges for Lanthimos––or if it ever takes precedence over whatever else has been developing––remains unclear. But with Christopher McQuarrie’s Colin Firth-led Three to Kill set up at Amazon, Manchette may soon become a hot property and place this on the fast track.

Find NYRB‘s synopsis below (and buy it from them rather than Amazon):

Whether you call her a coldhearted grifter or the soul of modern capitalism, there’s no question that Aimée is a killer and a more than professional one. Now she’s set her eyes on a backwater burg—where, while posing as an innocent (albeit drop-dead gorgeous) newcomer to town, she means to sniff out old grudges and engineer new opportunities, deftly playing different people and different interests against each other the better, as always, to make a killing. But then something snaps: the master manipulator falls prey to a pure and wayward passion.

Aimée has become the avenging angel of her own nihilism, exacting the destruction of a whole society of destroyers. An unholy original, Jean-Patrick Manchette transformed the modern detective novel into a weapon of gleeful satire and anarchic fun. In Fatale he mixes equal measures of farce, mayhem, and madness to prepare a rare literary cocktail that packs a devastating punch.