Scarlett Johansson, perfect typecasting for Ari Aster’s Scapegoat

Scarlett Johansson enters Ari Aster’s unstable territory. The project is titled Scapegoat, it will be written and directed by the filmmaker behind Hereditary and Midsommar, and it will arrive under the A24 banner — the natural home of his most recognizable obsessions: family, paranoia, discomfort, guilt, bodies that can never quite feel at ease inside a story.

For now, the plot is under lock and key.

The title Scapegoat is enough to imagine a film built around a guilt to be shifted elsewhere, a community ready to point the finger, someone chosen to absorb the evil of others. With Johansson at the center, the suspicion is that Aster wants to work on a public, magnetic, exposed figure.

Scarlett Johansson and the perfect typecasting of the digital scapegoat

After Jurassic World: Rebirth, Johansson has James Gray’s crime drama Paper Tiger, Brad Bird’s sci-fi noir Ray Gunn, Mike Flanagan’s new Exorcist, and a role in Matt Reeves’ The Batman Part II on her slate. According to reports, Scarlett Johansson was Aster’s first choice for the lead role — an important detail that leaves room for an almost inevitable subtext.

Scarlett Johansson does not arrive at Scapegoat as just any star, but as one of the actresses who, in recent years, has seen her face, her voice, and her identity become a battleground with generative artificial intelligence. First came the Lisa AI app case, accused of using the actress’s name, image, and voice without authorization in an AI-generated advertisement; then the controversy with OpenAI over the “Sky” voice, which Johansson described as “eerily similar” to her own after she had refused to lend her voice to the system.

In this sense, the title Scapegoat seems tailored to her as a perfect piece of typecasting: Johansson as a public body to be imitated, possessed, replaced, sacrificed. If Ari Aster is truly working with the idea of the scapegoat, he could hardly have chosen a face more loaded with contemporary ghosts: a diva whom the digital world has already tried to turn into a copy, a simulacrum, a target.

For now, no other cast members have been announced, and no story details have been revealed.

Scapegoat: Ari Aster returns to A24 after Eddington

Scapegoat marks a new collaboration between Ari Aster and A24, after the films that cemented his name in horror cinema and American arthouse cinema. According to the first reports, Aster will both write and direct the film. Production will be handled by Lars Knudsen through Square Peg, the company long tied to the director’s career.

Aster is coming off Eddington, a satirical neo-western thriller tied to the America of the pandemic, politics, and paranoia. After taking horror outside the house of Hereditary and the ritual community of Midsommar, Aster now seems to be working on a more social nightmare: no longer just private demons, but towns, groups, crowds, collective nervous systems.

The scapegoat is a perfect narrative figure for Aster, a director who has always told stories about characters trapped in dynamics larger than themselves, often already condemned before they even understand the rules of the game.

And if Hollywood continues to “love” stars, lighting them up until they become blinding, Ari Aster seems more interested in what comes next: the moment when that light turns into an interrogation, the face becomes a target, and a diva is left alone, at the center of the ritual, while everyone waits to see who will have to pay for someone else’s guilt.