Angelina Jolie Returns To The Thriller Genre In 'The Kept'

Angelina Jolie hasn't appeared in a live-action movie since 2015's By the Sea, a misbegotten passion project in which she co-starred with her then-husband Brad Pitt. But after spending the past few years directing and producing, Jolie is ready to get back in front of the camera again.

She'll make a big return to Disney with Maleficent 2 in 2020, but in the meantime, she's lined up a new project that will bring her back to the thriller genre for the first time since her 2010 spy film Salt. Read about the new Angelina Jolie thriller below.

Variety reports that Jolie is attached to star in a movie adaptation of The Kept, author James Scott's 2014 novel. Alice Birch (Lady Macbeth) is writing the screenplay, and no director is attached yet. Here's how Amazon describes the plot:

The story is set in the winter of 1897, and follows a trio of killers that descends upon an isolated farm in upstate New York. Midwife Elspeth Howell returns home to the carnage: her husband and four of her children, murdered. Before she can discover her remaining son Caleb, alive and hiding the kitchen pantry, another shot rings out over the snow-covered valley. Caleb, who is 12 years old, must tend to his mother until she recovers enough for them to take to the frozen wilderness in search of the men responsible.

For a little while in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it appeared as if Jolie was going to become Hollywood's go-to star for studio thrillers. She worked some magic opposite Denzel Washington in The Bone Collector and completely owned in 2004's Taking Lives, and this seems like an opportunity for her jump back into that sort of grimy, realistic genre with both feet.

Jolie might be making an Oscar play here too, because this sounds like it could be her version of The Revenant, the 2015 revenge thriller that finally earned fellow A-lister Leonardo DiCaprio his long-awaited Best Actor trophy. (Jolie won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for 2000's Girl, Interrupted, but has never won Best Actress.) The Kept's book description calls the mother character "enigmatic and mysterious," which is always a fun shade for Jolie to play, and I imagine there will be plenty of physicality to this performance, too – all things the old guard of the Academy tended to appreciate.

Awards talk aside, I'm just excited to see Jolie get back in front of the camera again, period. She's a magnetic presence when she's given great material, and this sounds like it's the kind of contained film that might even be shot, edited, and released before Disney is finished with post-production on Maleficent 2.