Blumhouse is making a movie about the mother who hunted down cartel members that killed her daughter

A few weeks before Elle published that wild story about the woman who gave up her journalism career for Martin Shkreli, there was another story everyone was talking about: “She Stalked Her Daughter’s Killers Across Mexico, One By One,” published in the New York Times on December 13. Written by Azam Ahmed, the feature tells the extraordinary and gut-wrenching true story of Miriam Rodríguez, a woman who set out to find the cartel members who kidnapped and murdered her 20-year-old daughter, Karen. When local law enforcement in San Fernando, Mexico failed to actively pursue Karen’s killers, Miriam took the case into her own hands, tracking cartel members down one by one and forcing local police to apprehend them. In all, Miriam was responsible for the apprehension of 10 people.

The lengthy feature is riveting and heartbreaking, and if you read it and thought, “This would make one hell of a movie,” you were extremely not alone: Deadline reports that Blumhouse has won the rights to adapt Ahmed’s article into a feature film following a bidding war among 16 companies. Blumhouse head Jason Blum will executive produce alongside Ahmed and Caitlin Roper, executive producer of scripted projects at the Times. It’s easy to imagine a scenario in which Miriam’s story is made more… explosive in its transition from page to screen, but what makes this tale particularly compelling isn’t because Miriam went on a vengeful tear and beat the crap out of a bunch of bad guys—quite the opposite. Miriam Rodríguez became a detective in her own right, smartly tracking connections via social media, using low-key disguises to obscure her identity, and conducting stakeouts around town—everything the police should have done but didn’t in a town that has a lengthy and devastating history of cartel violence.