Former Punisher and Mist-battler Thomas Jane had a rough ride with the studio bods on his last directorial effort Dark Country. He publicly complained about the final cut and the lack of a theatrical release, but the experience doesn't seem to have burned him too badly, since he's about to head back behind the camera for **The Wet House, in which he'll also star.
The title refers to an establishment that's kind of the polar opposite of a rehab facility: a wet house is apparently a place where substance abusers and addicts go to die, when their afflictions place them beyond recovery. It's a new one on us, but writer Jack Reher seems confident that it's a thing. The film's story involves a doctor at the facility - presumably Jane's character - enduring a haunting and slowly losing his mind.
Reher's screenplay is loosely based on, of all things, a short story by Charles Dickens. The Signalman, one of Dickens' Christmas ghost stories, sees the titular railway worker haunted by a spectre that repeatedly warns of accidents not long before they happpen. The Wet House echoes that set up, with the doctor encountering a patient who can similarly call tragedies in the making.
We're told that the film will be tonally along the lines of Jacob's Ladder, **Poltergeist **and Secret Window, so there are clearly drug freak-outs, spooks and twists afoot. It's the second project for Jane and Reher together: Reher also wrote Red Machine, the man-vs-grisley-bear quickie in which Jane stars with Billy Bob Thornton, James Marsden and Scott Glenn. That one's supposed to surface in the summer, while The Wet House is still coming together.