Michel Gondry Takes On Philip K. Dick's Masterpiece 'Ubik'

Michel Gondry is developing an adaptation of Ubik, and it's hard to imagine a better arranged marriage: the director who built Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind from cardboard and memory-collapse, taking on Philip K. Dick's 1969 novel in which reality itself curdles backwards — cigarettes going stale in your hand, coins aging out of your pocket, salvation available only as a spray can.

Ubik sits at the summit of Dick's catalog: after a lunar ambush, Joe Chip and his colleagues find time running in reverse and their dead employer's face appearing on their money. It is a metaphysical horror comedy about entropy, wrapped in the pulpiest possible packaging — Time magazine named it one of the century's hundred best novels, decades after it earned Dick a few thousand dollars.

Dick's screen record post-Blade Runner ranges from great (A Scanner Darkly, Minority Report) to disposable, but Ubik has defeated every developer since the author's own unproduced 1974 screenplay. Gondry's handmade surrealism feels like the first stylistic match.

Update: add Gondry to the casualty list — the project quietly dissolved, and Ubik remains gloriously unfilmed. The novel is cataloged here; someone will crack it eventually, probably when reality has decayed enough to meet it halfway.