Given Hideo Nakata’s track record – he directed The Ring (about a ghost who kills you by crawling through a TV) and Dark Water (about a ghost who, umm, haunts a water tank) – you’d expect, upon hearing that he’s just signed to direct a film called Chatroom, that it would be about a ghost who haunts the internet.
Well, you’d be wrong.
Instead, Chatroom – which Nakata will direct for WestEnd Films – is a psychological thriller about a group of teenagers who encourage each other’s destructive behaviour (via, we’re guessing, internet chatrooms). Which places this one more in realm of The Strangers rather than Nakata’s previous supernatural output.
The movie will mark Nakata’s first original English-language pic (he directed The Ring Two, the English-language sequel to the remake of his own Ringu), and will be written by Enda Walsh, screenwriter of Steve McQueen’s Hunger. Walsh adapted the screenplay from his own stage play.
"Nakata has come up with something very visual, very conceptual,” said Eve Schoukroun, founder of WestEnd Films, “and situated somewhere between Disturbia and Cube.” Does that make it Discubia, then?
Either way, this sounds like it has bags of promise. Filming will start in the UK in Spring.