Jordan Peele and Issa Rae are partnering on a…I guess we’ll call it a supernatural thriller, called Sinkhole. They will co-produce the project, and Rae might star in it. Based on Leyna Krow’s short story of the same name, it’s about a couple who move into their dream home, only to find a sinkhole in the backyard. The sinkhole, they learn, has magical properties that can fix any broken thing. Maybe even broken people? The story is really short, just four and a half pages, but I assume what they’re mining from Krow’s story is the intense pressure women put on themselves to be perfect: perfect people, perfect wives, perfect mothers. The story is succinct, but I read it (it’s online here), and this will probably stick with me for a while. The imagery is just so clear, of newly restored items sitting neatly on a table, waiting to be appreciated, and the narrator’s asides about how her marriage used to be are pointed. It reminds me a little of Paul Rudd’s Netflix show, Living With Yourself—a better you is a new you and is what you really want to be someone else?
Also, SINKHOLES ARE SCARY. Lainey is, interestingly, physically repulsed by them. I’m existentially terrified of them. Sinkholes are like brain aneurysms—you just never know. They happen! People get swallowed! I remember hearing a story once about a guy falling into a sinkhole and his friend hearing him moving around until…there was no sound. They never found a body. No one knew how deep the hole went! Then there’s that guy in Florida (of course) who was swallowed by a sinkhole in his sleep, and then two years later, the sinkhole reopened! There is no director for this project yet, but whomever it is, they will have plenty of tension and dread to work with, because few things are more upsetting than a bottomless hole in the ground.
