“Endless Night,” the much-acclaimed 1967 novel by the mid-20th century’s most influential crime-fiction maestro, is getting its latest modern adaptation courtesy of StudioCanal, a four-decade-old production/distribution company with a high-profile legacy of its own. (It is best known for producing such ’90s hits and classics as “Terminator 2: Judgment Day,” “Under Siege,” “Free Willy,” and “Falling Down.”) The film’s director is a Netflix series veteran whose feature-film debut this past summer rebooted an iconic franchise of the same age.
Jonathan Entwistle – An Overview
The director of “Endless Night” is Jonathan Entwistle, an English filmmaker responsible for creating two Netflix series: “The End of the F***ing World” (2017-19) and “I Am Not Okay with This” (2020). Both series are dark coming-of-age comedies. The former follows a depraved 17-year-old (Alex Lawther) who runs away from home with a rebellious classmate (Jessica Barden) whom he is secretly planning to murder, while the latter stars Sophia Lillis (of “It” fame) as a Carrie White-esque 17-year-old who is struggling to handle her unstable emotions and her telekinetic powers.
Entwistle’s first feature film is a more lighthearted tale of a young hero: this year’s “Karate Kid: Legends,” the sixth movie in the “Karate Kid” franchise and a familiar but surprisingly charming take on the classic martial-arts coming-of-age story. This film got a lukewarm critical reception but was a decent box-office success.
On Agatha Christie’s “Endless Night”
The late Agatha Christie (1890-1976) was an extremely prolific and successful English fiction writer whose specialty was the crime genre, particularly detective stories. She created not only one but two iconic sleuths – Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple – and her whodunit play “The Mousetrap” is the longest-running stage production in the history of London’s West End theatre, having opened for the first time in 1952 and only entered a brief hiatus in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Endless Night,” which was previously adapted for the big screen in 1972, tells the story of a poor, wayfaring 22-year-old man in rural England who falls in love with both a well-heeled heiress and a particularly attractive piece of land, even though the latter is said to be cursed.
Entwistle’s Modern Adaptation
Deadline describes the forthcoming adaptation as “a modern psychological thriller” and “a reimagining of” its 1967 source material. At this early stage, it’s anyone’s guess how profoundly a present-day setting will affect “Endless Night’s” plot, characters, and setting. However, considering Christie’s unfortunate legacy of racist language and tropes in her oeuvre, changing the name of “Gipsy’s Acre” and the specter of a Romani curse is a likely and welcome start.
At this time, no actors have been announced in connection with the project. The writer of the adapted screenplay is Emily Siegel, a journalist and author whose previous screenwriting work includes an adaptation of another mystery thriller, Andrea Bartz’s “We Were Never Here,” and an original script, “Story,” that made it onto 2020’s Black List.
Final Thoughts
“Endless Night” arguably represents yet another coming-of-age tale for Entwistle: the story of a young person and his doomed attempt to settle down as a newlywed. Will his style lend itself well to a slow-burning, quasi-Gothic crime story set in the present day? At present, it’s unclear exactly how long we’ll have to wait to find out.
