Non Compos Mentis: Paul Schrader Moves His Noir Into the Family

Paul Schrader is preparing Non Compos Mentis: Worthington, Hemsworth and Delevingne in a noir about two brothers, a sick mother, desire, money and power.

Fresh from Venice with The Basics of Philosophy, Paul Schrader already has another film ready to start. Non Compos Mentis is expected to enter production in New York as early as October. Leading it will be Sam Worthington, Liam Hemsworth and Cara Delevingne: Hemsworth was already attached to the project, while Worthington and Delevingne are the more recent additions.

The cast, moreover, is still settling. Sarah Pidgeon has left the film, while the participation of Caleb Landry Jones and Dianne Wiest, announced at an earlier stage of development, remains to be clarified. Other roles are still being defined. Producing will be David Gonzales, already a Schrader collaborator on Master Gardener and Oh, Canada.

Paul Schrader returns to noir, but moves sin inside the family

Schrader has explained that he now has several projects ready and that none of them belongs anymore to the solitary-man model that marked much of his recent filmography. Non Compos Mentis is expected to be the first to start.

The story Schrader has built distributes the idea of losing control far beyond illness. According to the new synopsis, the two sons belong to the same privileged class but to different worlds: one is a sophisticated New York criminal lawyer, the other a more aggressive corporate heir. The balance between the two brothers begins to break down when the first becomes involved with a younger woman, bringing to the surface rivalries, interests and tensions that had until then remained hidden.

The project has actually been circulating for almost two years and has changed shape several times along the way. In 2024 Schrader described it as a “beauty film,” something rich and visually seductive in the vein of The Comfort of Strangers, set in the world of New York finance. He also spoke of a “Malafemmena noir”: a story in which the arrival of a woman alters male relationships thought to be stable, but the current formulation suggests something more interesting than a simple femme fatale.

From Taxi Driver to Non Compos Mentis: the problem remains who is in control

Here the real detonator seems to be a family that owns everything except the ability to govern what is happening to it. The mother progressively loses autonomy, the estate becomes a battlefield, and those who, by profession, should understand rules, consequences and responsibility end up being the first to lose control of them.

It is territory Schrader knows well: his characters build order around what they cannot dominate. Discipline, faith, work or money do not erase chaos; they keep it at a distance until something forces them to look at it. Non Compos Mentis seems to transfer this tension from the individual conscience to the family: no longer only one man’s guilt, but a system of bonds, interests and dependencies that begins to give way precisely because everyone insists on asserting themselves within it.

For Schrader, who at eighty continues to accumulate stories rather than draw conclusions, the only possible ending is still the one in which the justifications run out and only the illusion of control remains.