The Filmmaker Who Says M. Night Shyamalan Stole Her Movie

The first time Francesca Gregorini heard of the new Apple TV+ series Servant, created by M. Night Shyamalan and Tony Basgallop, was in November 2019, the day the trailer for the horror series was released. The filmmaker immediately began receiving calls from friends and fellow directors. “Some of the calls were congratulatory, because they assumed I had sold the rights to my film and it had been turned into a series,” Gregorini told me on the phone from Los Angeles. “And then a couple of the calls [were] from other filmmakers who know what happens in Hollywood, and who were ... up in arms letting me know that something had gone terribly wrong.”

and Gregorini’s 2013 film, , seem to share a premise: A mother who’s grieving the death of her baby uses an eerily lifelike” to help her process the loss, and subsequently forms an intimate relationship with the nanny she hires to take care of the “infant.” Still, Gregorini said, the similarities don’t end there. She argues that virtually all of her movie was repurposed by Shyamalan and Basgallop in : aesthetic details, characters, plot developments, even the blocking of certain shots. “I felt like my film had been studied in semiotics class and they had been given the task of ‘Remake this,’” she said. From specific details to broad themes, she observed, “nothing was left untaken.”