Julia Ducournau has her next film set up, and it’s an adaptation of a book that’s taken her native France by storm over the past year.

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According to Trois Couleurs, Ducournau’s new feature will be “My Real Name Is Elizabeth,” based on Adèle Yon‘s 2025 bestseller. The hybrid novel covers Yon’s investigation into her great-grandmother, Betsy, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia in post-war France and institutionalized at her husband’s request. Yon covers Betsy’s seventeen years of forcible treatment, which ended with the woman being lobotomized, through recovered letters, family interviews, medical records, and a road trip to various locales. Yon’s book has been a sensation in France since its publication last year, selling 282,000 copies and already translated into 21 languages.

But it’s not the popularity of “My Real Name Is Elizabeth” that attracts Docournau to this adaptation. It’s more that the source material contains some of the filmmaker’s most essential interests: family secrets and inherited violence, mother-daughter relationships, intergenerational trauma, and women stalked and haunted by patriarchy and loss. All three of Docournau’s previous films tackle those elements to some degree, although “Alpha” may be the most overt. Docournau’s surrealist touch combined with Yon’s book could make for a startlingly effective recipe.

Then again, Docournau may be looking for a solid bounce-back movie after “Alpha” didn’t fare well with critics and audiences last year. The film bombed at its Cannes world premiere, with NEON quietly releasing it in US theaters this past February. And while “Alpha,” though uneven, isn’t a film without merit, its failure is not how Docournau wanted to follow up the Palme d’Or-winning “Titane,” her sophomore feature, or “Raw,” her biting (pun intended) 2016 debut. The inherited acclaim of Yon’s book could give “My Real Name Is Elizabeth” some oomph when the director brings it to the Croisette. And that’s exactly what Docournau wants to do: she’s eying a Cannes 2028 world premiere after she shoots the film next year.

So, will “My Real Name Is Elizabeth” be a return to form of sorts for Docournau? In short, we’ll see, but the adaptation will be entirely her own project, as Yon won’t be involved with it at all. “I received many offers from directors, but I only wanted her,” Yon told Le Monde. She is a fascinating, feminist, independent artist, [but] I need to move on to other things. Julia Ducournau will take Elisabeth somewhere else.” It’s hard not be excited to take that journey with Ducournau in a couple of years.