More Casting News for the Film Adaptation of The Hypnotist

Early last year we reported that the first mystery in the Joona Linna series by Lars Kepler, The Hypnotist, was being adapted for film. Today additional casting news was announced.

Lena Olin and Tobias Zilliacus are joining Mikael Persbrandt in the film, the latter playing the titular character with Olin playing his wife. Zilliacus will star as Detective Inspector Joona Linna. Production is expected to begin early in 2012 in Stockholm with Lasse Hallstrom directing. An October 2012 release date is planned for Sweden.

In the book, the first of eight planned in the series — all of which have been pre-optioned for film — a gruesome triple homicide in the frigid clime of Tumba, Sweden, attracts the interest of DI Linna, who demands to investigate the murders. The killer is still at large, and there’s only one surviving witness — the boy whose family was killed before his eyes. Whoever committed the crimes wanted this boy to die: he’s suffered more than one hundred knife wounds and lapsed into a state of shock. Desperate for information, Linna sees only one option: hypnotism. He enlists Dr. Erik Maria Bark to mesmerize the boy, hoping to discover the killer through his eyes.

It’s the sort of work that Bark has sworn he would never do again — ethically dubious and psychically scarring. When he breaks his promise and hypnotizes the victim, a long and terrifying chain of events begins to unfurl.

The Hypnotist was originally published in 2009 in Sweden as Hypnotisören. Lars Kepler is a pseudonym used by Alexander Ahndoril and Alexandra Coelho Ahndoril.

(Source: The Hollywood Reporter.)