Mick Jagger is on an island in the Tyrrhenian Sea playing a lighthouse keeper, and Dakota Johnson is among the cast working around him. Alice Rohrwacher is filming Three Incestuous Sisters on Stromboli, with Jagger in the role of the keeper and Josh O’Connor playing his son.
The project brings together a cast that was announced earlier and now includes Johnson, Jessie Buckley, Saoirse Ronan and O’Connor. It is also Rohrwacher’s English-language debut, a notable turn for a filmmaker whose work has built a reputation on precise, fable-like storytelling.
Three Incestuous Sisters adapts Audrey Niffenegger’s visual novel from 2005, and the move to Stromboli gives the production a setting that feels inseparable from the kind of elemental mood Rohrwacher often favors. The island location matters because this is not a studio-bound production dressed up to look remote; the film is being made in a place whose isolation and volcanic landscape are part of the story’s atmosphere.
That atmosphere also sharpens the contrast inside the casting. Jagger, who has acted in feature films before in Performance, Ned Kelly, Freejack, Bent and The Man from Elysian Fields, is not just returning to a screen role but stepping into one that places him at the center of a family arrangement with O’Connor as his son. Jagger has also worked as a producer on Enigma, The Women and Get on Up, which makes his presence in the film less of a novelty than it first appears.
Rohrwacher arrives at this production with clear momentum. Her 2018 film Happy as Lazzaro won best screenplay at Cannes, and her 2023 film La Chimera starred O’Connor as a looter of ancient artefacts. That reunion with O’Connor gives Three Incestuous Sisters a familiar creative thread even as the project itself pushes her into English for the first time.
What makes the film worth watching now is not simply the cast list, but the way the pieces already fit together: a director making a first English-language feature, a source novel with a distinctive visual identity, and a location that can shape the mood before a frame is even cut. If Rohrwacher carries the same confidence from Happy as Lazzaro and La Chimera into this production, Three Incestuous Sisters is likely to be more than a prestige ensemble piece. It is shaping up as a film with a very specific world, and Stromboli is already part of the performance.
