Reeve LeClaire escaped a sadistic kidnapper as a teenager. A decade later her therapist asks her to help a woman who has just been rescued, and the contact reopens her own case and sends her looking for the man responsible while other missing women may still be alive. That is the setup for Found Alive, which opens the 59th Sitges Film Festival on October 8 with Chloë Grace Moretz in the lead and a first-look image out ahead of it.
Carlota Pereda directs, her third feature and her first in English. Her last one was Piggy, the Spanish film about a bullied teenager who watches a killer take her tormentors and says nothing about it, and Pereda has brought its composer, Olivier Arson, with her.
She is also the first Spanish woman to direct a Sitges opening film, and only the fourth woman to do it at all.
A True-Crime Writer Built Reeve First
Found Alive adapts The Edge of Normal, Carla Norton’s 2013 novel, which was also the film’s original title. Norton writes true crime as well as fiction, with the nonfiction Perfect Victim among her credits, and Reeve was durable enough to get a second book, What Doesn’t Kill Her. Matt Venne, who wrote on Dexter: Resurrection, and Lori Evans Taylor, who co-wrote Final Destination: Bloodlines, share the screenplay with Pereda.
Rupert Friend plays Dr. Ezra Learner, the psychiatrist who brings Reeve in. Scott Haze plays the man she ends up chasing, credited as The Duke, and Thomas Cocquerel is in there as Nick. XYZ Films, Vanishing Angle and Industry Entertainment produced, and the whole thing shot in Utah across May and June of 2025.
Moretz Has Usually Been the Thing to Fear
Moretz has a deeper horror résumé than most actors her age: Let Me In in 2010, Carrie in 2013, Suspiria in 2018. In two of those three she is the thing the film is afraid of. Reeve puts her on the other side of it, playing the one who got out and has to go back toward the thing she got out of.
Sitges runs October 8 to 18 and has the film in Official Fantàstic competition as well as the opening slot. The festival bills it as “a fast-paced survival thriller masterfully filmed by the director of Piggy.” It runs ninety-six minutes.
No US distributor has been named and there is no release date. Pereda turned a bullying story into something genuinely hard to sit through last time, and ten years of aftermath is a bigger canvas than one bad summer. Sitges gets first look at what she did with it.