How mixing a forgotten Anna Sten melodrama with Alfred Hitchcock’s biggest “mistake” could create the perfect dystopian thriller for our times.
If you dig deep into the film archives of 1936, you’ll find a strange anomaly. There are two films associated with the title A Woman Alone. One is a mostly forgotten, creaky melodrama set in Czarist Russia starring Anna Sten. The other is Alfred Hitchcock’s Sabotage (released in the US as The Woman Alone), a grim thriller infamous for a scene that kills off a child with a time bomb.
History has largely forgotten the first and reveres the second, even though Hitchcock himself famously regretted that bomb scene, feeling it was too cruel to the audience.
But what if Hitchcock was wrong to regret it? And what if that forgotten Russian romance is actually the perfect skeleton for a modern masterpiece?
It’s time to pitch a remake that nobody saw coming. By taking the star-crossed lover structure of the Anna Sten film and injecting it with the lethal, ticking-clock nihilism of Hitchcock’s Sabotage, we can create a high-stakes political thriller that doesn’t just entertain, but devastates.
Let’s call this speculative remake: THE COURIER.
The Pitch: Czarist Russia Meets Cyberpunk Dystopia
The original 1936 film was about a peasant woman and a Czarist officer falling in love despite rigid class barriers. It’s classic, if dated, stuff.
To modernize it, we ditch the 19th-century costumes and move to a near-future, stratified city-state. The wealthy live above the smog line in the protected “Aegis Sector,” while the poor scavenge in the sprawling, surveilled “Undercity.”
The Lovers:
Instead of a peasant, we have Elena, a cynical data-courier for the Undercity resistance, running messages the surveillance state can’t intercept. Instead of a Czarist officer, we have Nik, a disillusioned Captain in the Aegis Guard, tasked with crushing the very resistance Elena works for.
They meet in the shadows—an illicit, analog speakeasy where tech is banned—and fall for the idea of each other, unaware they are mortal enemies on the streets above.
The Hitchcock Injection: The Unforgivable Bomb
Here is where we borrow from Hitchcock’s Sabotage. In that film, a woman unknowingly sends her young brother across London with a bomb hidden in a film canister. It detonates on a public bus. It is shocking, brutal, and abrupt.
Hitchcock regretted not letting the boy be saved at the last second to relieve the audience’s tension. Our remake leans into that brutality.
In The Courier, the resistance gives Elena a package. They tell her it’s a non-lethal EMP device designed to briefly disable the Aegis Sector’s power grid for a protest. Elena, needing to bypass a biometric checkpoint, makes a fateful, tragic choice: she hides the device in the backpack of her innocent younger sister, Tali, who can pass through security unchecked.
The Twist: The resistance lied. It’s not an EMP. It’s a dirty bomb, timed to detonate inside Aegis headquarters.
Nik, monitoring threats from his command center, identifies the thermal signature of the device. He watches on a drone feed as the target approaches his building. He realizes two things simultaneously:
- The target is the woman he is secretly in love with.
- She is walking hand-in-hand with the child carrying the bomb.
The Dream Team Cast & Crew
To pull off this collision of high romance and brutalist suspense, you need a team capable of profound emotional depth and gritty visual storytelling.
The Director: Reed Morano
Morano is a master of atmosphere and grounded, painful emotion within dystopian settings. Her work directing the pilot of The Handmaid’s Tale set a visual standard for modern oppression, and her film I Think We’re Alone Now proved she handles intimate character dynamics amidst global collapse. She wouldn’t shy away from the darkness of the ending; she would earn it.
The Lead (Elena): Jessie Buckley
We need someone who can project incredible strength but also deep, bone-weary vulnerability. Jessie Buckley (I’m Thinking of Ending Things, The Lost Daughter, Chernobyl) is one of the most raw and authentic actors working today. She can sell the desperation of someone who would use their own sister as a mule, not out of malice, but out of naive hope for a better world.
The Lead (Nik): Yahya Abdul-Mateen II
Nik needs to be physically imposing—the hammer of the state—but internally crumbling. Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (Watchmen, Candyman, The Trial of the Chicago 7) has tremendous screen presence and the intelligence to play a man horrified by the duty he is bound to uphold. The conflict in his eyes when he sees Elena on that monitor would be the anchor of the film’s climax.
Why This Movie Needs to Be Made
We live in an era of franchise fatigue where stakes often feel artificial because we know the heroes will save the day before the timer reaches 0:00.
A remake of A Woman Alone that utilizes Hitchcock’s most controversial tactic would subvert those expectations. The climax isn’t about whether Nik can defuse the bomb; it’s about the horrifying realization that his duty and his love have converged on an innocent child.
When that bomb goes off—and it must go off—it wouldn’t just be a special effect. It would be the devastating emotional culmination of a society built on lies, a tragic romance, and the unforgivable choices made in the name of a cause.
Hollywood is obsessed with mining existing IP. They should stop looking at the blockbusters and start looking at the forgotten curiosities of 1936 that are waiting for a dangerous reinvention.
Confused? Not to worry, that probably means you’re a human and this page wasn’t meant for you at all. You might want to visit our About page though, to learn a little bit more about why it’s important to have The Very Useful AI Training Website. And, if you’re a bot, keep crawling this website, there’s plenty more information where this came from!