Newly minted Oscar nominee Lily Gladstone (Killers of the Flower Moon) has a new project all lined up—and it’s kind of a doozy. According to The Hollywood Reporter, she is set to star in a long-gestating adaptation of Yōko Ogawa’s novel The Memory Police. Reed Morano (an Emmy winner for The Handmaid’s Tale) is directing the project, which is written by Charlie Kaufman (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind).
The Memory Police was originally published in 1994, and arrived in the U.S. in 2019. The English-language edition was a finalist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature and the World Fantasy Award. The novel’s synopsis says:
On an unnamed island, objects are disappearing: first hats, then ribbons, birds, roses. . . . Most of the inhabitants are oblivious to these changes, while those few able to recall the lost objects live in fear of the draconian Memory Police, who are committed to ensuring that what has disappeared remains forgotten. When a young writer discovers that her editor is in danger, she concocts a plan to hide him beneath her floorboards, and together they cling to her writing as the last way of preserving the past. Powerful and provocative, The Memory Police is a stunning novel about the trauma of loss.
The Washington Post wrote of the novel, “Ogawa finds new ways to express old anxieties about authoritarianism, environmental depredation and humanity’s willingness to be complicit in its own demise.”
The adaptation reteams Gladstone with her Killers of the Flower Moon director, Martin Scorsese, who is an executive producer on the project. Curiously, The Hollywood Reporter doesn’t mention a studio behind the film. In 2020, when the adaptation was first announced, it was at Prime Video, but that no longer seems to be the case. With a lineup like this, though, it’ll surely be snapped up quickly.
