Charlize Theron will star in and produce the film adaptation of Gillian Flynn's best-selling novel, Dark Places. The book will be adapted for the screen and directed by Gilles Paquet-Brenner.
Theron will play the role of the novel's narrator and antagonist, Libby Day. Libby is the sole survivor of a massacre in the fictional town of Kinnakee, Kansas. She witnesses the murder of her sisters and mother in what appears to be a Satanic cult ritual. Libby escaped through a window and would later testify against her teen-aged brother. Twenty-five years after the massacre, Libby meets with a group of amateur investigators who believe that her brother is innocent of the crime. She begins an investigation of the events of the massacre.
Paquet-Brenner directed and co-wrote Sarah's Key, starring Kristin Scott-Thomas, a French-language drama that unexpectedly became the top-grossing foreign language film of 2011 in the U.S. And, back in 2001, he wrote and directed Pretty Things, another drama featuring a strong female lead in Marion Cotillard. So he seems a solid choice for the material; Gillian Flynn is also the author of Gone Girl, a runaway bestseller that is under development as a movie, with David Fincher eyeing it as his next project.
Meanwhile, Theron is coming off a year in which she played major, villainous roles in Snow White and the Huntsman and Prometheus, and it certainly seems like time for her to turn back toward the heroic side.