Mary Elizabeth Winstead (The Thing remake) has been cast to star opposite John Goodman (Inside Llewyn Davis) in The Cellar, a new movie being produced by J.J. Abrams’ production company, Bad Robot. The film will be directed by Dan Trachtenberg, known mainly for his shorts More Than You Can Chew and Portal: No Escape, both of which garnered a substantial amount of attention for the young filmmaker.
The movie deals with a young woman who wakes up in an underground cellar after a serious car wreck to find she is being held captive by a doomsday survivalist who claims that a nuclear attack has rendered the outside world uninhabitable.
Producing along with Bad Robot will be Paramount’s genre label, Insurge, which is known for developing high-concept projects on budgets under $5 million.
The plot would seem to emulate the captive/captor structure familiar to audiences in films like Misery and Insurge’s own The Loved Ones.
Not much is known about The Cellar outside of the synopsis of the film, with Bad Robot being known for keeping their projects tightly under wraps. The script was written by Josh Campbell and Matt Steucken, with Dan Casey having done the most recent rewrite. The film has also been reported as going by the name Valencia.
Mary Elizabeth Winstead will star alongside Jeremy Renner later this year in Kill The Messenger. Dan Trachtenberg had been previously attached to direct an adaptation of the Brian K. Vaughn comic Y: The Last Man as well as the sci-fi action film Crime of the Century, but it seems that both those projects may have been put on hold.