Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley are set to reunite in Hold On to Your Angels, an “impossible love story” from writer-director Benh Zeitlin that is being shopped to buyers at the 79th Cannes Film Festival.
The film is set in Louisiana and follows a hell-bound outlaw and a ferocious shepherd of lost souls who fall into catastrophic love, with Mescal playing the outlaw and Buckley the shepherd. Production is set to begin in South Louisiana in February 2027, but the project does not yet have a release date.
Zeitlin described the film as the most impossible love story he has ever witnessed, calling it an outlaw romance for the end of America on the crumbling edge of South Louisiana. He said he has been dreaming of telling it since its hero, Pam Harper, walked into an audition for Beasts of the Southern Wild 17 years ago, and framed it as both a love letter to an endangered way of life and a rallying cry for empathy across a fractured planet.
The project gives Zeitlin a return to the kind of mythic, Gulf Coast storytelling that made Beasts of the Southern Wild a breakout. That 2013 film received four Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director, and helped establish him as a filmmaker drawn to intense realism mixed with myth and magic. Plan B said Zeitlin had stunned audiences and the industry with the “cosmic sorcery” of that film and is now bringing the same mix to an epic love story.
For Buckley and Mescal, the new film marks a reunion after Hamnet, Chloé Zhao’s adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel. That film follows Agnes and William Shakespeare as they reel from the death of their young son, and Buckley won the Oscar for Best Actress in a Leading Role at the 98th Academy Awards in March for her performance as Agnes. Hamnet also received nominations for Best Picture and Best Director.
Hold On to Your Angels is still early in development, but the Cannes timing matters because the project is now actively being sold while its cast and production plans are taking shape. The film’s appeal rests on a straightforward proposition: a director with a strong visual identity, two actors coming off a celebrated collaboration, and a love story set against the rough edges of South Louisiana that is meant to feel as large as myth and as immediate as survival.
