Morgan Freeman & Al Pacino to star in Sniff, a film noir set in a retirement home

It’s Brick for the retirement home crowd. Deadline has reported that a hot package is set to be unveiled at the Toronto International Film Festival that already has a stacked cast which includes Morgan Freeman and Al Pacino.

Morgan Freeman, Al Pacino, Helen Mirren, and Danny DeVito are set to star in Sniff, all a “stylish reinvention of the film noir genre” that will be helmed by The Devil’s Advocate director Taylor Hackford from a script by Tom Grey. What’s Sniff all about? I’ll let the official logline do the talking. “When two residents die under suspicious circumstances, retired detective Joe Mulwray (Freeman) is pulled back into the action by his former partner William Keys (DeVito) as they uncover a hidden underworld of sex, drugs, and murder in the high-end, luxury retirement community controlled by kingpin Harvey Stride (Pacino) and his femme fatale enforcer, the Spider (Mirren).” That definitely sounds as though it has enormous potential. Sniff is an acronym for Senior Nursing Institute & Family Foundation.

Taylor Hackford told Deadline that he’s always been a big fan of film noir and was delighted when he received the script for Sniff. “The whole concept of setting a film noir in an upscale retirement community… these are proliferating all over the United States as the baby boomer generation gets to retirement,” Hackford said. “There’s a lot of money, and people want to live in a beautiful setting. Those are on the brochures, but what Tom Grey did was show what was lurking below the surface. I thought it was a brilliant idea and he understood the nature of good noir — the dark story, the incredibly twisted characters — and I thought he had a great handle.” Hackford also pointed to Rian Johnson’s Knives Out as an inspiration. “I loved what Rian Johnson did in terms of taking an old genre, the whodunit, and spicing it up with life and making it real in the contemporary situation. That’s what I have in mind for Sniff in the film noir,” Hackford explained.