In news that will comes as no surprise to anyone who watched Chloé Zhao’s emotional tour de force Hamnet — or indeed the press tour for Chloé Zhao’s emotional tour de force Hamnet — it looks like stars Paul Mescal and freshly minted Oscar winner Jessie Buckley are already gearing up to fall in love and break our hearts on the big screen once again. As Deadline reports, the stars and IRL best pals are set to reunite in Hold Onto Your Angels, an epic new romance from Oscar-nominated Beasts Of The Southern Wild director Benh Zeitlin.
Set to be introduced to potential buyers at Cannes later this month ahead of a prospective February 2027 shoot, Hold Onto Your Angels is set to see writer-director Zeitlin return to the bayous of South Louisiana for a love story that sounds poles apart from Mescal and Buckley’s last team-up. Per the description shared by Deadline, Zeitlin’s latest “follows a hell-bound outlaw (Mescal) and a ferocious shepherd of lost souls (Buckley) who fall in catastrophic love as their crumbling bayou paradise drags them under.” Honestly, Zeitlin had our curiosity at ‘hell-bound outlaw’, our attention at ‘ferocious shepherd of lost souls’, and our tickets bought by the time we got to ‘catastrophic love’.
“Hold On To Your Angels is the most impossible love story I’ve ever witnessed — an outlaw romance for the end of America, set on the crumbling edge of South Louisiana,” shared Zeitlin in a statement accompanying the movie’s announcement. “I’ve been dreaming of telling it since its hero, Pam Harper, walked into an audition for Beasts of the Southern Wild seventeen years ago. It’s a love letter to an endangered way of life — and a rallying cry for empathy across a fractured planet.”
Added production company Plan B: ““Benh Zeitlin absolutely stunned us and the world at large with the cosmic sorcery of Beasts Of The Southern Wild. With Hold On To Your Angels, Benh has set his powerful mix of intense realism, myth, and magic against the large scale of an epic love story. This is a writer/director with a vision for the ages and we could not be more proud to be by his side to make this film with Jessie and Paul.”
Just how exactly Zeitlin’s fantastical sounding latest will take form is anybody’s guess at this point: if Beasts Of The Southern Wild taught us anything, it’s that Zeitlin is a filmmaker who very much marches to the beat of his own drum. Suffice it to say however, with Mescal and Buckley leading and Benh Zeitlin at the helm, hold onto your butts before you Hold Onto Your Angels — it’s gonna be a must-see.
