The director of a 2026 streaming smash heads to Netflix for new sci-fi action thriller

Netflix is rolling the dice again on original sci-fi films, this time with a project that looks less like your standard effects romp and a bit more like an emotional drama – albeit one involving teleportation (finally, something other than time travel getting a shake). The film in question is called Blur, and the streamer is keeping the actual plot under wraps, hoarding the logline like it’s a Marvel cameo spoiler.

What’s actually known? Not a lot, but the key detail is it’s a mother-daughter story with a teleportation angle. That combination’s rare: Hollywood usually treats teleporting as an excuse for globetrotting action or disaster, with the 2008 flop Jumper still haunting everyone’s memory. Here, at least, it sounds like the sci-fi gimmick will be wrapped around something more personal. The producers are Shawn Levy and Dan Levine from 21 Laps — the same outfit behind Stranger Things, so Netflix are clearly banking on pedigree.

Blur is billed as a mother-daughter story hinging on teleportation — one of the few blockbuster sci-fi ideas Hollywood has nearly always fluffed so far.

The Gory Credentials

The writing side of this gets interesting: the script started out with Christy Hall and Dan Casey, but is now being reworked by Kirill Sokolov and Ellen Shanman. Sokolov’s the wild card here — he broke out with the Russian black comedy Why Don’t You Just Die! back in 2019, which turned a Moscow flat into a splatterfest and nabbed western attention at the Window to Europe festival a year earlier. Think a mix of Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino, but with Russian plumbing.

Sokolov’s follow-up was another hyperviolent action comedy (No Looking Back), and by the 2020s he’d made his move to the US, angling for a Hollywood shot. Fast forward to this spring and he’s got it: They Will Kill You, his English-language debut, landed on Warner Bros., tore up the streaming charts to hit number one, and now he’s working with Netflix. That’s some whiplash career progression.

They Will Kill You hit the number one slot for streaming films globally this spring, off the back of Sokolov’s signature carnage-with-style approach.

Directorial Style (and Gaps)

Still, the reviews for Sokolov’s American outing didn’t hold back. Bloody Disgusting loved the way he pinched inspiration from spaghetti westerns and anime to spice up the bloodshed, and Rolling Stone, ever quick to spot an angle, saw it as a savvy platform for Zazie Beetz’s rise to top billing as an action lead. The sticking point in every review? All the flash but not enough substance: RogerEbert.com said it flat-out, calling the story thin and forgettable under the stylish chaos.

Which might explain the appeal of Blur for Sokolov — instead of another exercise in gory one-upmanship, this is a chance to anchor things in actual emotion, with a script being shaped by more than one set of hands and a production company that’s proven (at least with Stranger Things) it can balance heart and spectacle. There’s always the risk it dissolves into Netflix’s generic sci-fi mishmash, but a bit of character-driven storytelling could be exactly what the director needs to get out of the middle-tier blender.

Quick Look: They Will Kill You

• The plot: An unsuspecting woman lands a job as a housekeeper in an eerie New York high-rise, only to get tangled in disappearances and (possibly) a Satanic cult controlling the building.