According to Variety, 2016 Tribeca Film Festival award winner Women Who Kill has been acquired by FilmRise for worldwide VOD and digital rights. The Film Collaborative will release the film theatrically. The comedy-crime-mystery won the Narrative Feature Screenplay Award at Tribeca.
In her feature film debut, writer-director Ingrid Jungermann stars as Morgan, who lives with her ex-girlfriend Jean (Ann Carr). The two are locally famous true-crime podcasters obsessed with female serial killers. Morgan, a commitment-phobic woman, gets involved in a new romance with someone who might just be a murderer. Also in the cast are Annette O’Toole (We Go On), Sheila Vand (Whiskey Tango Foxtrot), theater performer Shannon O’Neill in her feature film debut, and Deborah Rush (TV’s Billions). Alex Scharfman produces. Lauren Brady and Eric LaFranchi co-produce. Cliff Chenfeld, Craig Balsam, Jim Rosenthal, Rick Milenthal, Victor Zaraya, Stacie Passon, Jay Van Hoy and Lars Knudsen are executive producing.
In our review from the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival, John Wedemeyer wrote, “Women Who Kill scores big points for a solid premise, and a great title, but its unable to straddle the comedy and thriller genres, falling into a murky grey space in between. For a comedy, it’s short on laughs. For a thriller, it’s short on thrills. So, Women Who Kill isn’t the wry genre blender it wanted to be; it’s still a great name for a solid podcast. If it doesn’t exist already, someone should get on it.
In a review for Variety, Dennis Harvey wrote: “A shaggy, banter-driven quasi-thriller in the mode of Manhattan Murder Mystery (or The Thin Man movies, for that matter), Women Who Kill offers a drolly amusing, lightly macabre variation on the standard lesbian romantic comedy…Jungermann deploys a lot of improv talent for this Brooklyn-set tale of two ex-lovers who host the titular morbidly-themed podcast, and find their insular social circle suddenly invaded by a possible genuine compulsive murderess.”
Jungermann, the creative force behind web series The Slope and F to 7th, said, “It is an honor to work with FilmRise and The Film Collaborative and we are all thrilled to share Women Who Kill with audiences everywhere. I wanted to make a film that took my appreciation of classic film genres — romantic comedies, mysteries, and a dash of horror — and twist it up into something that resembles a heightened version of my own life experience.”
The Film Collaborative, the first non-profit distributor of independent films, has not yet set a theatrical release date.