Amazon is making a big swing for what sounds like a pretty high-profile project: According to Variety, the mega-retailer/streaming platform has hired Charlie Kaufman to write a feature adaptation of Yōko Ogawa’s The Memory Police, with award-winning Handmaid’s Tale director Reed Morano set to go behind the camera. The book, which sounds appropriately Kaufman-esque (so he should be able to have some fun with it), takes place on an unnamed island where normal everyday things keep disappearing and most of the people on the island forget they ever existed. Those who do remember live in fear of the Memory Police, an organization that does… pretty much what you’d think it does.
Variety says that the book is “an Orwellian novel about the terrors of state surveillance,” which seems like a pretty appropriate setup for something in 2020—not to mention Kaufman’s particular talents with this kind of weird sci-fi/surreal story. He did win an Oscar for writing Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, which was all about forgetting stuff. As for Morano, her last film was The Rhythm Section, which gave Blake Lively a Bond-esque spy adventure. This project sounds a little more think-y, which is more in line with Morano’s Emmy-winning work on The Handmaid’s Tale.