The Hole: Theo James teams with I Saw the Devil director Kim Jee-woon

There’s a new film called The Hole coming our way from South Korean director Kim Jee-woon, and a press release has revealed that Theo James of The Gentlemen, the Divergent films, and the upcoming Osgood Perkins / Stephen King movie The Monkey is set to star in it. James will be taking on the role of Owen, a successful professor living abroad in South Korea, who is bedridden after a devastating car accident that killed his wife, Sandy. He is left under the care of Yuna, his Korean mother-in-law — but when she starts to unravel the devastating truth behind Owen and Sandy’s marriage, and Owen himself, his road to recovery is threatened.

Scripted by Christopher Chen, The Hole is based on the 2017 Shirley Jackson Award winning novel of the same name by Hye-young Pyun. This adaptation is being produced by Esmail Corp, K Period Media, and Anthology Studios. The Veterans will be representing international distribution rights at the American Film Market next week. CAA Media Finance and UTA Independent Film Group are representing the US rights. Individual producers are Sam Esmail, Chad Hamilton, and Nick Krishnamurthy of Esmail Corp; Kimberly Steward and Alex Foster of K Period Media, and Andy Sorgie of Paisan. Jee-woon is also producing, as is Jay Choi. Soon Ho Song who will serve as a co-producer for Anthology Studios.

The press release notes that the story will be told in a combination of English and Korean, as it takes place in both the United States and South Korea. Filming will take place in both countries, with production expected to start in the first or second quarter of 2025.

The novel had the following description: Oghi has woken from a coma after causing a devastating car accident that took his wife’s life and left him paralyzed and badly disfigured. His caretaker is his mother-in-law, a widow grieving the loss of her only child. Oghi is neglected and left alone in his bed. His world shrinks to the room he lies in and his memories of his troubled relationship with his wife, a sensitive, intelligent woman who found all of her life goals thwarted except for one: cultivating the garden in front of their house. But soon Oghi notices his mother-in-law in the abandoned garden, uprooting what his wife had worked so hard to plant and obsessively digging larger and larger holes. When asked, she answers only that she is finishing what her daughter started. A bestseller in Korea, award-winning author Hye-young Pyun’s The Hole is a superbly crafted and deeply unnerving novel about the horrors of isolation and neglect in all of its banal and brutal forms. As Oghi desperately searches for a way to escape, he discovers the difficult truth about his wife and the toll their life together took on her.

Kim Jee-woon’s previous directing credits include The Quiet Family, The Foul King, A Tale of Two Sisters, A Bittersweet Life, The Good the Bad the Weird, I Saw the Devil, the Arnold Schwarzenegger film The Last Stand, The Age of Shadows, Ilang: The Wolf Brigade, Untact, and Cobweb (the South Korean movie, not the horror film produced by Seth Rogen).

Does The Hole sound interesting to you? Have you read the Hye-young Pyun novel the film will be based on? Share your thoughts on this Theo James / Kim Jee-woon collaboration by leaving a comment below!