It was the kind of project that gets whispered about on the Berlinale circuit and then, quietly, starts to happen. Claire Denis, the French director whose 1999 film Trouble Every Day spent twenty-five years haunting the kind of people who saw it once and never fully recovered, is moving forward with a new cannibal crime drama called The Soap Maker. According to Variety, Denis is attached to write and direct, with producers now in place following the project’s first public appearance at Berlin’s European Film Market in 2025.
The premise is exactly what it sounds like. A female-led crime narrative. Cannibalism as load-bearing plot architecture, not garnish. In a festival landscape that has spent recent years rewarding films about women doing extremely dark things in extremely composed visual registers — see the awards circuit run of The Substance, the long tail of Julia Ducournau’s Raw — The Soap Maker arrives with its timing already sorted.
Denis, now in her late seventies, has never been a director who chases a moment, which is part of what makes the project interesting rather than calculated. Her 2022 English-language pivot with Stars at Noon divided critics at Cannes before finding its audience later. The Soap Maker sounds considerably less ambivalent about what it wants to be.
No cast, no shoot date, and no distributor have been announced publicly as of this filing. Festival positioning — Cannes, Venice, or Berlin again — will likely depend on how quickly the production calendar firms up through 2026.