In one of the big deals announced out of Canada’s Fantasia Film Festival, XYZ Films has boarded North American sales rights to “New Life,” John Rosman’s feature directorial debut which is hailed by Fantasia itself as “one of the major discoveries of Fantasia 2023.”
“New Life” stars Sonya Walger (“For All Mankind,” “Lost”) and Hayley Erin (“Pretty Little Liars: The Perfectionists,” “General Hospital”) and Tony Amendola (“Annabelle,” “Curse of Llorona”).
XYZ Films has also dropped the film’s first teaser, shared in exclusivity with Variety, ahead of “New Life’s” world premiere on Aug. 8 at Fantasia, North America’s biggest genre festival.
“New Life” is also written by Rosman and produced by T. Justin Ross, producer on Shudder’s record-breaking hit “The Mortuary Collection” and the Judy Greer-led “Aporia,” also premiering at Fantasia, and Mike Marchlewski.
The film is executive produced by David Lawson Jr., producer of the Independent Spirit Award-nominated Sundance darling “Something in the Dirt” and the critically acclaimed sci-fi horror “The Endless,” among others.
“With ‘New Life,’ John has created a tense, gripping thriller that blurs its genre roots in ways that completely upended our expectations,” said XYZ Films’ Senior Vice President of Sales & Acquisitions Pip Ngo. “We can’t wait for audiences to experience the same sense of surprise and delight (and horror) that we felt watching it the first time.”
“New Life” indeed works on multiple levels: as a woman-hunt thriller rising to the sudden horror of potential global apocalypse, both of which drive the story of two women discovering a new life that, however harrowing, represents some new kind of freedom.
Leaning into the movie’s entertainment value, the teaser captures the first and second. Walger plays a fixer, Elsa Gray, one of her company’s best, contracted to bring in dead or alive Jessica Murdock, a young woman on the run after a terrible event whose details, unspecified for much of the film, has left her bloodied and battered when “New Life” begins.
Jess hides away in a pickup truck that takes her to the pine forest mountains of the Pacific Northwest, heading for the Canadian border as Elsa closes in.
But the massive surveillance operation launched to find her hints there’s more to her case. “Does Jessica know?” Elsa asks her boss. Know what? As the film spirals to climax, Jessica climbs some stairs, caught in the teaser’s major moment of excruciatingly drawn-out tension, to a sight that will give her an answer.
For more clues, briefly glimpsed, watch the trailer.
Meanwhile, Elsa fights her own personal struggle with ALS, diagnosed six months before. “As their two unique stories inextricably link, and a trail of bodies begin to mount, the stakes of the pursuit soon rise to apocalyptic proportions, the synopsis reads.
“‘New Life’is the result of so many talented people dedicating their time and energy to transform this film into something bigger than was ever on the page,” said Rosman. “To have an incredible company like XYZ Films recognize our work, and join the team, is a win for all of us, and truly in spirit with how this indie movie was made.”
“New Life” will have its European premiere at London’s FrightFest, the UK’s premiere genre film festival, following its Fantasia launch.
“New Life is one of those rare thrillers that transcends its genre. The power of its story not only comes from its haunting cinematic moments, but from the conceptual terror that accompanies them,” said producer T. Justin Ross. “It’s this unique character-driven horror that helped us build an incredible coalition of cast, crew, and partners who are the best at what they do to tell this story, and we’re thrilled to add XYZ Films to that list.”
In addition to “New Life,” XYZ Films is also representing Yeva Strelnikova’s “Stay Online” and Teresa Sutherland’s “Lovely, Dark, and Deep” at the 27th edition of the Fantasia International Film Festival.
Variety caught up with Rosman, an Emmy-Award winning journalist for public media, whose stories appearing on outlets such as NPR and PBS, in the run-up to Frontières and “New Life’s” Fantasia world premiere at Fantasia.
New Life
Credit: XYZ FILMS
There’s one large part of “New Life” which the teaser doesn’t have space to take in: Elsa and Jess are linked not just by the woman-hunt but both are battling their own personal worlds end. Could you elaborate very briefly, if that’s not an oxymoron?
Something interesting to me during the writing process, and then later working with our actors — Sonya Walger (Elsa) and Hayley Erin (Jess) — was finding ways to make their separate stories, one big story. To me, at the risk of sounding insufferable, there’s a central theme of grief in the movie. How the characters navigate the stages of it within their own “personal world’s end,” and what they do with the information they get, when they get it, ends up creating the stakes of the film and why we might see one character as more heroic than the other.
Another singular aspect to “New Life” is its constant recourse on the soundtrack to maybe the greatest folk-rock song of all time: Bob Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone.” It has literal reference to Jess, but a metaphorical one to Elsa. The film also seems to pick up a typical Dylan ambivalence: That Miss Lonely’s fall is kind of new freedom. Scrounging her next meal, no direction home, Jess, for example, has found a new freedom. “I wanna see the world,” she says enthusiastically. Could you comment?
Bob Dylan is the greatest. The way he explores the idea of freedom in that song is both nuanced and vast, a story you can picture and some feeling barely out of reach. Just having his work play in our movie breathes so much life into some of those ideas you mentioned. The hope is that it also gives us some insight into Elsa — who she might have been before being defined by work — and how she’s trying to hold on to such a little thing like a song as her world flips upside down.
Why are you helping me?” Jess asks a man who drives her towards the border. “It has good people,” bartender Molly says of her small town. It’s striking that your vision of normal people, their solidarity, is really quite upbeat…
Ha! I do believe people are naturally good, and want to help each other. I know that’s maybe Pollyanna-ish in what feels like the age of increasingly worse news cycles. But, I feel it’s better than the alternative.
