Jessica Lange is bringing Mary Tyrone back, and this time it's on film. Quiver Distribution has acquired North American rights to the feature adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's Pulitzer-winning play, and the studio is putting it in select theaters on September 25, following a special screening at Film at Lincoln Center on September 14.

Lange plays the same role that won her a Tony in 2016, the addiction-plagued matriarch at the centre of O'Neill's autobiographical family drama. Ed Harris plays her husband James, a self-made stage actor turned failed property investor. Ben Foster is the elder son Jamie, charming and hard-drinking in equal measure, and Colin Morgan plays Edmund, the younger son who stands in for O'Neill himself, poetic and consumptive.

This is director Jonathan Kent's first feature. He's spent decades in theatre and opera, at the Almeida, the Royal Opera House, on Broadway and in the West End, and he directed this same production on stage in 2016, with Lange in the lead even then. "To translate and adapt what is arguably America's greatest play to the screen demands, above all, a remarkable cast," Kent said. He called working with Harris and Lange again "an exhilarating experience," adding that the four actors together "achieve this magnificently."

Quiver's co-presidents, Berry Meyerowitz and Jeff Sackman, didn't undersell it either. "Jessica is nothing short of striking," they said in a joint statement, calling her work here possibly "the defining performance of her illustrious career across stage and screen." That's a big claim for an actress with two Oscars already on her shelf, from Tootsie to Blue Sky, but the studio clearly thinks this is the one they'll campaign hard on come awards season.

David Lindsay-Abaire, who adapted Rabbit Hole for the screen, wrote the screenplay based on O'Neill's play. Gabrielle Tana, Bill Kenwright, Gleb Fetisov and Redmond Morris produced. The deal itself was struck between Larry Greenberg and TJ Smith on Quiver's side and David Gilbery and Naomi George representing BK Studios.

The film has already had a life on the festival circuit, having screened at the Dublin Film Festival back in February 2025 with both Lange and Harris in the audience. Word from that screening has been building quietly for over a year now, the kind of slow-burn buzz that tends to precede a serious awards push rather than a wide commercial rollout.

With a September 25 theatrical date locked in and Kent already moving on to direct a new musical in Madrid this October, the next real test comes once critics who weren't in Dublin get their first look. Whether Quiver expands the release beyond select theaters, or holds it tight for an awards run, is the question that follows.