Condemned nuns, a missing sea captain and his poet wife: that is the strange triangle at the heart of The Confessions, a new film that has signed Alexander Skarsgård, Hunter Schafer, Maya Hawke and Harry Melling, with Ari Aster producing.
The project comes from the Canadian trio of Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson, who will direct. Aster and his longtime producing partner Lars Knudsen are backing it through their company, Square Peg. The film was announced on November 10 as it heads to the American Film Market for sales. Aster, who calls himself a devoted fan of the trio, praised the screenplay as “singular and beguiling.”
The filmmakers call it a cautionary psycho-dramedy. The story follows a group of condemned nuns who witness a cursed, globe-spanning love triangle involving the captain and his wife. Their own pitch line is even stranger: the film is “part religio-maritime rough-music psychomachy, part hallucinated saltwater shaming parade.”
Decoding the pitch
That line is dense on purpose, so here it is unpacked. “Rough music” is an old English name for a noisy folk custom in which a community banged pots and pans outside the home of someone it wanted to shame, often over a marriage scandal. A “psychomachy” is a battle for the soul, named after an allegorical Latin poem in which virtues and vices fight it out. Put together with “saltwater shaming parade,” the filmmakers seem to promise a seafaring morality play about public judgment, with the nuns as an audience and a jury.
No character names or role breakdowns have been released, so which actor plays the captain, the poet or the nuns remains unannounced.
A reunion after Rumours
The Confessions reunites the directors with Square Peg after Rumours (2024), their comedy horror film in which Cate Blanchett, Charles Dance and Alicia Vikander play G7 leaders lost in a fog-bound forest full of reanimated bog bodies. That film premiered out of competition at Cannes in May 2024, and Blanchett won a Canadian Screen Award for her lead comedy performance.
For Aster, the deal adds to a busy producing slate. Since founding Square Peg with Knudsen in 2019, he has produced Dream Scenario (2023), Bugonia (2025) and The Drama (2026), while directing Hereditary, Midsommar, Beau Is Afraid and Eddington. His own next film as director, Scapegoat, is slated to begin production this month with Scarlett Johansson and Jacob Elordi attached.
The cast
- Alexander Skarsgård recently starred in Wicker.
- Hunter Schafer is next seen in the series Blade Runner 2099; Badiyaa covered the Blade Runner 2099 final trailer pairing Schafer with Michelle Yeoh.
- Maya Hawke is best known as Robin Buckley in Stranger Things.
- Harry Melling recently appeared opposite Skarsgård in Pillion.
That last pairing is worth flagging: The Confessions puts Skarsgård and Melling back on screen together after Pillion, which played the New York Film Festival in 2025.
Who is paying for it
Daniel Bekerman’s Scythia Films and the directors’ Canadian company, Thin Stuff, also produce, with support from Telefilm Canada. Elevation Pictures will release the film in Canada, CAA Media Finance and WME share the North American rights, and Charades is selling it internationally. More film news sits on Badiyaa’s entertainment page.
No start date for filming or release window has been set; the next milestone is what buyers make of it at the American Film Market this week.
Further reading
Image: Peter Kudlacz, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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