Peaky Blinders creators buy filming rights to ‘bingeable and profound’ thriller from Cork author Louise O’Neill

Louise O’Neill with her An Post Irish Crime Novel of the Year award for ‘After the Silence’, which is to be adapted for screen. Picture: Clare Keogh

A thriller by Louise O’Neill looks set to be adapted for the screen by the production team behind the successful BBC series Peaky Blinders.

Tiger Aspect has bought the film and television rights for After the Silence, which is set on an island off the Irish coast and follows a documentary crew's attempts to uncover the truth about the death of a young girl at a party there 10 years earlier.

The novel was named the An Post Irish Crime Novel of the Year after its release in 2020 and O’Neill said she always thought it would work well on film.

“While writing After the Silence, I often thought how cinematic it was – the bleak beauty of a windswept island off the Irish coast, the structuring of the novel around a true crime documentary, and a complex, complicated female character at its heart," she said.

“I’m delighted that Muirinn Lane Kelly, Lucy Bedford and Tiger Aspect Productions feel the same! I’m a huge fan of their work and I’m excited to see what they will do with this adaptation.” 

After the Silence by Louise O’Neill

The rights were bought from Emily Hayward-Whitlock at The Artists Partnership by Tiger Aspect, a Banijay UK company on behalf of Juliet Mushens at Mushens Entertainment.

“I’ve always loved Louise’s novels, and it’s wonderful to be working with her on After the Silence,” said Lucy Bedford, head of drama at Tiger Aspect.

“This feminist thriller challenges us to examine our obsession with true crime as entertainment, while also looking compassionately and unflinchingly at domestic abuse and coercive control. It is both bingeable and about something meaningful and profound. And it has the most brilliant twist at the end…” 

O’Neill has written that she was inspired to write the novel after listening to the West Cork podcast, which documents the 1996 murder of Sophie Tuscan du Plantier in Schull, not far from O’Neill’s childhood home.

“While the story I tell in my new novel, After the Silence, is not based on this or any other real-life case, the questions raised by the West Cork podcast did spark the initial idea,” O’Neill said.

Another of O’Neill’s novels, Asking For It, was adapted for stage by Landmark Productions and The Everyman in association with the Abbey Theatre in 2018. It was a critical success, boasting sold-out runs and winning the Audience Choice Award at the Irish Times Irish Theatre Awards.