Claire Denis is moving forward with The Soap Maker, a cannibal crime drama she is writing and directing, with producers now in place on a project that has been in development since at least Berlin’s European Film Market in February 2025, per a Variety report filed this year.
Denis, whose 2001 film Trouble Every Day covered adjacent territory — also cannibalism, also French, also not for the squeamish — has not disclosed cast, a distributor, or a production start date.
The title refers to a practice historically associated with the rendering of human fat, a detail the film’s eventual marketing department will presumably need to work around.
No synopsis has been released. The producer attachments were not named in the initial report. What has been confirmed is the director, the genre, and the title — which, for a project about cannibalism, does most of the work a logline would otherwise do.