Synchronicity Continues Collaboration with The Cry’s Helen FitzGerald

Synchronicity Films is again working with author Helen FitzGerald (The Cry), optioning the rights to her novel Bloody Women to develop as a series.

Bloody Women is being adapted for the screen by writer and journalist Lorna Martin, who co-created and wrote the comedy-drama series Women on the Verge. FitzGerald’s Bloody Women is being developed as an 8×45-minute darkly comedic thriller.

On the morning of her wedding, while at a posh hairdresser’s in Glasgow, 33-year-old Cat Marsden is marched to a police station and shown a severed penis. On very close inspection, she confirms that it almost certainly belongs to her ex, Johnny. She also confirms that she slept with him in the hours before his death, the days leading up to her wedding. What she can’t confirm is whether or not she’s responsible for mutilating and murdering him.

All3Media International, which has a first-look deal with Synchronicity, holds global rights to the project.

Claire Mundell, founder and creative director at Synchronicity Films, said: “We’d probably option every Helen FitzGerald novel if we could, but Bloody Women is definitely one of our favorites—a gloriously playful, hooky page-turner with its tongue firmly in its cheek and an idiosyncratic but instantly loveable female lead. In Lorna Martin, we’re so lucky to have found the perfect screenwriter to adapt this big-hearted and entertaining novel for television.”

FitzGerald added: “Bloody Women was such a fun book to write and I am so excited that my favorite producer, Claire Mundell of Synchronicity Films, is adapting it. After the brilliant adaptation of The Cry, I cannot wait to see what they can do with this one. And I am bowled over to have screenwriter Lorna Martin adapting, whose work is funny and dark and twisted and poignant—exactly my cup of tea. This is a match made in serial killer heaven!”

Martin said: “It has been an absolute thrill escaping into the hideously dark and twisted world Helen created and adapting it with the fantastic team at Synchronicity. I loved The Cry and am a huge fan of the tragedy and comedy that runs through Helen’s work. As well as the darkly comedic murder mystery in Bloody Women, what really attracted me to the project were the flawed and dysfunctional but also very human female characters at the heart of it. Worryingly, I found them very relatable.”