Maria Bakalova and Peter Mullan to star in a Christmas Eve thriller about a mother escaping a psychotic Santa in No Way Off

The corpse of Halloween is barely cold, but studios are keen to announce holiday-themed projects nonetheless. Thankfully, this one sounds like one hell of a ride! Maria Bakalova (The Apprentice, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3) is catching a ride alongside Peter Mullan (The Magdalene Sisters, Children of Men) for No Way Off, a Christmas Eve thriller from Downton Abbey director Brian Kelly. Kelly directs from a script by Gaby Hull (Two Weeks to Live, We Hunt Together), with James Wilkinson producing.

Akin to movies like The Shallows, Buried, and Crawl, No Way Off finds Bakalova in the role of 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 falls 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.”

Finally! A holiday-themed Speed with a psychotic Santa Claus! I guess Santa got my letter.

Bakalova, who made a splash when she duped Rudy Giuliani into a faux interview in Sasha Baron Cohen’s Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, recently played Ivana Trump in The Apprentice. The Ali Abbasi-directed docudrama tells how a young Donald Trump (Sebastian Stan) started his real-estate business in the 1970s and ’80s in New York with the help of infamous lawyer Roy M. Cohen (Jeremy Strong).

Meanwhile, Peter Mullan, a seasoned actor across multiple genres, plays King Durin III in Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. His upcoming film, I Swear, stars him in a drama focusing on John Davidson’s life story. Diagnosed with Tourette’s at 15, targeted as insane by his peers, he struggled with a condition few had witnessed. Campaigning for Tourette’s as an adult, he accepted his MBE from the Queen in 2019.

What do you think about the premise for No Way Off, starring Maria Bakalova and Peter Mullan? Would you board a bus piloted by a driver wearing a latex Santa mask? How will Laura escape her crisis? We can’t wait to find out.