Hayley breaks down the films and TV series based on books due to hit screens in the coming months.
Queer
Call Me By Your Name director Luca Guadagnino had a big 2024. Although only hitting theatres in April this year for us, Queer was his second film to release last year, following the tennis love triangle flick, Challengers. Featuring Daniel Craig in a role that takes quite a left turn for his post-Bond career, Queer is based on the semi-autobiographical novella by William S. Burroughs, written in the 1950s while awaiting trial for the murder of his wife, but not published until 1985. Craig stars as Lee, an American expat living a solitary and debaucherous life in Mexico City in the 1950s, who finds connection with Eugene (Outer Banks star Drew Starkey), a fellow expat and former soldier.
The Amateur
A spy thriller… in cinemas? With series like Black Doves, The Night Agent and The Day of the Jackal, this kind of story seemed to be going the way of television rather than film. But The Amateur is keeping espionage on the big screen and turning to an old classic of the genre for inspiration, adapting the 1981 novel of the same name by Robert Littell, which had previously been made into a Canadian film in the same year. After playing the villain in the last Bond film, No Time To Die, Rami Malek is flipping the script and taking on the lead role of a rogue hero, starring as Charles, a cryptographer for the CIA who aims to take revenge into his own hands after his wife is killed in a terrorist attack.
Small Things Like These
Fresh off his explosive Oscar win for Oppenheimer last year, Cillian Murphy is pivoting to a very different kind of film and role, starring in an adaptation of Claire Keegan’s 2022 novella Small Things Like These. Taking place in the small Irish town of New Ross in the lead up to Christmas 1985, Murphy plays Bill Furlong, a quiet and hard-working coal merchant who witnesses a young girl being turned over to the local convent – an example of the horrific Magdalene Laundries that operated in Ireland until the mid 90s, in which unwed mothers had their children taken from them and were forced into unpaid labour. As Bill, a father of five girls himself, turns a blind eye to the cruelty, he is forced to confront his own complicity in a country ruled by the Catholic church.
The Narrow Road to the Deep North
The Narrow Road to the Deep North
Aussie author Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North joins the likes of Life of Pi and The English Patient to be one of the few Booker Prize winning novels to be adapted for the screen. Made into a miniseries by director Justin Kurzel for Amazon Prime Video, the first two episodes recently premiered at the Berlin Film Festival to very impressive reviews. Set across three timelines, the series follows WWII veteran Dorrigo Evans (played by Jacob Elordi, who, I only found out when researching this, is Australian??) in three phases of his life: his affair with his uncle’s young wife before the war, his capture by the Japanese and imprisonment working on the Burma “Death” Railway, and his old age in 1989 Sydney (played in this section by Ciarán Hinds).
Murderbot
Apple TV+ seems to be churning out book adaptations like no other streamer, and after the success of their sci-fi series like Foundation, Silo and Severance, they’re coming in hot with another of each, based on the Murderbot Diaries series of novels by Martha Wells. Played by Alexander Skarsgård, Murderbot (a self-designated name) is a government-assigned android tasked with overseeing a group of scientists taking samples from a distant planet. But Murderbot has hacked its own control module, and now just wants to be left alone to watch its entertainment feed all day. This robot is a sarcastic, genderless, socially awkward misanthrope, and is what makes this comedic sci-fi so beloved by the readers. With seven titles in the book series, there’s plenty of material for further seasons too.
The Life of Chuck
The Life of Chuck is an odd one. Based on one of the four novellas in Stephen King’s 2020 collection If It Bleeds, the “life-affirming” film is a bit of a shift in tone for horror director Mike Flanagan, known for his various Netflix series and previous King adaptations Gerald’s Game and Doctor Sleep. On top of that, after taking home the coveted People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2024, it bucked a 12-year-long trend in which the winner goes on to be nominated for a Best Picture Oscar in the following year–or, in three of those cases, win that too. Having only gained distribution after its premiere and win, it’s now finally hitting screens, starring Tom Hiddleston as the titular character and following his life in three reverse-chronological segments in an apocalyptic world.
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