Ambrose Chapel

Brian De Palma

Buried for decades. Now, Brian De Palma’s wildest vision comes to life.

Written in the 1990s between Carlito’s Way and Mission:
Impossible, visionary filmmaker Brian De Palma’s Ambrose Chapel is his most overtly comic thriller — a wild, unproduced “screwball noir” that spins through kidnapping, virtual reality, mind control, murder, terrorists, romance, dream sequences and dueling memories. Set in a vividly imagined Mexico City, the story centers on Christe Rivera, a woman entangled in a shadowy conspiracy and haunted by a memory — or is it a dream? a lie? — that may be the key to everything. Along the way, Christe is drawn into the orbit of a billionaire with presidential ambitions and a plan to wall off Mexico from the U.S., while a half-forgotten Hitchcock film may hold the answer — if she can survive long enough to remember what’s real and who she is.

A kinetic blend of playful intrigue, romantic chaos and signature De Palma paranoia, Ambrose Chapel is a revelatory window into one of cinema’s most iconoclastic auteurs, offering a vision both prescient and laced with volatile invention, and a thrilling glimpse of the film De Palma never got to make.

Dormant for thirty years, Ambrose Chapel now appears in its first authorized publication, under the supervision of Brian De Palma — one of Hollywood’s most daring and iconoclastic directors. Framed by a new introduction by film scholar James Kenney that places the screenplay within the arc of De Palma’s evolving career and the larger tapestry of his recurring obsessions, this edition introduces cinephiles to a bold De Palma thriller that has lived only in whispers and speculation — until now. A master of suspense and cinematic bravado, De Palma reshaped modern film with Carrie (1976), Dressed to Kill (1980), Blow Out (1981), Scarface (1983), and The Untouchables (1987), as well as Phantom of the Paradise, Body Double, Casualties of War, Carlito’s Way, Mission: Impossible and Femme Fatale — each a bold stroke in a legendary career.