Borat star Maria Bakalova will board a bus with Peter Mullan for the single-location thriller, No Way Off.
Veteran Scottish actor Peter Mullan is set to lead single location thriller No Way Off for Altitude, starring opposite Borat: Subsequent Moviefilm’s standout performer, Maria Bakalova.
Downton Abbey director Brian Kelly will make the film, based on a screenplay by Gaby Hill, who recently wrote crime thriller series We Hunt Together. Matthew James Wilkinson will produce for his Stigma Films banner.
The premise sounds, quite frankly, amazing: a single mother and her baby son find themselves trapped on a moving bus drvien by a mask-wearing maniac. Also, it’s set at Christmas.
The synopsis reads as follows:
Inspired by single-location thrillers such as The Shallows, Buried and Crawl, No Way Off is set on Christmas Eve and revolves around Laura, a young mother who waits at a bus stop with her infant son. When the bus pulls up, its driver is wearing a latex Santa mask. Laura climbs aboard, collapsing into her seat. Exhausted and stressed, she soon fall asleep. When Laura wakes, night has fallen. The bus is now hurtling along a motorway, miles off its usual route. Apart from the sleeping baby, she is the only passenger left on board. She can’t outrun the driver – she’ll have to outsmart him.
Kelly said in a statement published by Deadline, “My dreams have come true. No Way Off has a brilliant cast and a killer script, I can’t wait to enjoy the ride”.
With Irish drama Small Things Like These, adapted from Claire Keegan’s novel by playwright Enda Walsh and directed by Tim Mielants, being released this week, it’s an opportune moment to say that Peter Mullan’s magnificent, incredibly dark 2002 drama The Magdalene Sisters covers similar ground and is well worth watching.
Bakalova will next be seen in Bulgarian-Greek black comedy Triumph, about the fall of communism in the 1990s, while Mullan is part of the cast of fact-based drama Lockerbie, which will air on BBC One.
