Noomi Rapace and Millicent Simmonds Team Up for Dystopian Nightmare No Man’s Land

Here’s one that jumped out at me: Noomi Rapace and Millicent Simmonds are teaming up for a future-set, women-led horror thriller called 'No Man’s Land' from filmmaker Vasilisa Kuzmina. It’s Kuzmina’s first English-language feature, and the pitch has that 'oh this could go really dark' energy.

The basics

• Director: Vasilisa Kuzmina (feature debut was the 2022 Russian drama 'Nika'; before that she made multiple shorts and worked on the Russian comedy 'Alisa' and the Russian comedy-thriller 'Besit')
• Writers: Vasilisa Kuzmina and Daisy Anderson
• Stars: Noomi Rapace ('The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo') and Millicent Simmonds ('A Quiet Place')
• Tone comps: 'The Handmaid’s Tale' meets the ritual-heavy dread of 'Midsommar'

"A dystopian thriller with elements of The Handmaid’s Tale and the ritualistic tension of Midsommar."

The setup

Rapace plays Magda, an enigmatic, steel-spined leader who has built an entirely female-run community in the wreckage of a civil war. Simmonds is Elle, a true believer in Magda’s mission. The wrinkle: Magda’s son returns from the front lines to this men-free world, and his presence rattles the group. Hostility starts to simmer, then boil, and the violence that follows forces him to realize the community’s hard-won peace might be built on choices that could get him killed.

The real-world spark

Even though the movie is set in the future, Kuzmina and Anderson took inspiration from a very real, very grim slice of history: the Angel Makers of Nagyrev in Hungary. In the 1910s and 1920s, a close-knit circle of women in a small village — reportedly rallied by a charismatic figure known as Auntie Suzy — began poisoning their abusive husbands to take back control of their lives. The death toll estimates are all over the place, from around 50 to several hundred. And once the poison started flowing, not every victim fit the 'abusive husband' description. It’s a disturbing, complicated story, and you can see why a filmmaker would latch onto it for a dystopian horror angle.

Why this could hit

Rapace doing morally thorny leadership, Simmonds as a committed disciple, and a premise that blends cult-like loyalty with wartime fallout — that’s fertile ground for a nervy, slow-burn nightmare. Deadline says this is Kuzmina’s English-language feature debut, and between the historical inspiration and the genre hooks, it sounds like she’s swinging big.