Directors ranging from Billy Wilder to Roman Polanski to Tobe Hooper have previously found drama in apartment dwelling, and it's now the turn of Egidio Coccimiglio. His indie thriller Compulsion has just landed Carrie-Anne Moss and Heather Graham, as neighbours giving new meaning to the phrase "apartment complex".
Moss is playing Saffron, a cool former child star with a nice line in self-deprecating cynicism, whose discrete cage is rattled by the vacuous Amy. Amy, a chef, has just emerged from a bad break-up and fantasizes about fame and glamour, with a dream of her own show on The Food Channel. When she discovers the identity and past of the woman across the hall, her fragile grip on reality starts to unravel.
The officially-released synopsis cryptically says that both women are fearless, "but while the chef fears nothing about life, her neighbour fears nothing about death." That's not going to end well, is it?
The set-up brings to mind any number of other female-centric psychodramas, but without quite knowing the approach here, it's difficult to pin down what to expect. At its artiest it could be a bit like Bergman's Persona; at its most mainstream, Single White Female. And that former-child-star business can't help but feel like a nod to the still-mindblowing Whatever Happened To Baby Jane?.
That's all just musing though. What we definitely know is that Kevin Dillon and Joe Mantegna are also appearing in as-yet unspecified roles, and that shooting has just started in Ontario.