Ready to watch a new film from the “Bodies Bodies Bodies” team of director Halina Reijn and A24 this week?
A24 has acquired the rights to “Instinct,” an erotic thriller from Reijn that debuted at the 2019 Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland (it also played the Toronto International Film Festival shortly after) and is planning a one-night-only event to release the film later this week, Thursday, Sept. 22, in its screening room. Tickets will go on sale later on Monday.
This will mark the first time that the film has been screened in North America since its film festival debut in 2019 and will also be the first time that A24 has used its screening room platform for a movie that it acquired instead of produced. (Other events utilizing the screening room have included “The Green Knight” and “Marcel the Shell with Shoes On.”)
“Instinct” will screen as part of a double-feature with “Bodies Bodies Bodies,” the incredibly Gen-Z whodunnit slasher movie that debuted over the summer and made a nearly $12 million at the domestic box office.
Technically Reijn’s debut feature, since she made it before “Bodies Bodies Bodies,” “Instinct” stars Carice Van Houten as a criminal psychologist who falls for a dangerous sex offender (Marwan Kenzari) who is about to be released from an institution. The movie was warmly reviewed, currently sitting at an 80% freshness rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
Reijn wasn’t the first filmmaker to attempt to tackle “Bodies Bodies Bodies;” the road to production on this relatively straightforward little horror comedy was a complicated one. A24 first secured the rights to a spec screenplay from “Cat People” writer Kristen Roupenian in 2018 and in 2019 assigned Chloe Okuno to re-write the script and direct. By 2021, a cast had been set and Reijn was now going to direct from a script by Sarah DeLappe (Roupenian has a “story by” credit). Okuno’s excellent thriller “Watcher” ended up coming out around the same time as “Bodies Bodies Bodies” (you can watch it now on Shudder).
Halina is repped at CAA, 2 AM, and Jackoway, Austen, Tyerman, Wertheimer, Mandelbaum, Morris, Bernstein, Trainer & Klein.
Variety first reported the “Instinct” news.
