Alma Pöysti Returns in Beatrice—A Body-Swap Love Story That's Actually About Grief

What you need to know: Golden Globe-nominated Finnish actress Alma Pöysti stars in Beatrice, a new Estonia-Lithuania-Italy co-production about a woman who dies in a car accident and returns in a stranger's body. Directed by Vallo Toomla, the film explores whether love survives when the person you knew is trapped in an unrecognizable form. Currently in production with no confirmed release date or streaming platform yet.

When Alma Pöysti took home a Golden Globe nomination for Fallen Leaves in early 2024, she became the rare kind of actor who doesn't need a franchise or a prestige TV series to command attention. That quiet, persistent presence—playing a supermarket worker navigating Helsinki's emotional weather with almost no dialogue—stuck with people. So when news dropped in May 2026 that she'd signed on to lead Beatrice, a film about a woman who returns from death in the wrong body, the reaction was immediate: this is worth watching.

Here's what makes that reaction warranted.

The Premise: Love When Recognition Becomes Impossible

Beatrice doesn't hinge on a clean sci-fi twist. Set in near-future Europe, the film follows a woman named Beatrice who dies in a car accident and comes back to her husband and child but inhabits a completely different body. The story asks a genuinely uncomfortable question: Can he still love her? Can she still love herself?

That's based on an award-winning play by Estonian playwright Siret Campbell. Director Vallo Toomla co-wrote the screenplay with Małgorzata Piłacińska, and he's been explicit about what he's actually making: "Although Beatrice is set in a speculative near future, at its core it is an intimate and at times uncomfortable love story. It is about the difficulty of letting go and the search for oneself."

Notice what he didn't say: romance, redemption, triumph. He said uncomfortable. That matters.

Who's Actually Making This (And Why Their Track Records Matter)

Alma Pöysti — you already know the Golden Globe story. But what you should know is that Fallen Leaves won the Jury Prize at Cannes 2023, one of the festival's top-tier honors. She held that film on her shoulders through 100 minutes of near-silence. She can do that again, but under completely different emotional circumstances.

Valentina Bellè brings significant international pedigree. She appeared in Michael Mann's Ferrari and in the Hulu/Sky adaptation of Catch-22, which means she's worked inside large-scale productions and knows how to carry weight in an ensemble without dominating the frame.

Priit Võigemast is best known for Truth and Justice, the Estonian epic that earned an Academy Award shortlist nomination for Best International Feature. That film ran 2 hours and 40 minutes and became Estonia's highest-grossing domestic release ever, pulling in over 264,000 admissions in a country of 1.3 million people. Two actors with Oscar-adjacent credentials in one cast doesn't happen by accident.

Vallo Toomla directed Pretenders, which premiered at San Sebastian International Film Festival, a circuit that rewards emotional precision without sentimentality. Most coverage of Beatrice treats this as a straightforward prestige play, but the more revealing detail is Toomla's choice of co-writer: Małgorzata Piłacińska comes from Polish genre cinema, not arthouse. That pairing signals a film willing to lean into body-horror discomfort rather than aestheticize it away, and it's the single biggest reason I think Beatrice won't play like a typical European festival drama. He's on record saying he's "fascinated by the horror of replaceability and the extreme testing of love." Not safe language. That's a director willing to let scenes sit in discomfort.

The production companies—Stellar Film (Evelin Penttilä and Johanna Maria Tamm), Apollo Film Productions (Tanel Tatter and Veiko Esken), with additional partners from Lithuania and Italy—are betting on broad international distribution. When producers use that language publicly, they usually mean it.

What the Cast Actually Said About This Material

Pöysti told Variety the film has "a strong humanistic approach to a troubling futuristic world." More importantly, she said: "It's such an intricate and touching story, with themes circulating around ethical choices, instincts, empathy, identity, love, exploitation and sacrifice."

That's not a paycheck quote. That's someone who read the script and immediately understood what Toomla was building.

Valentina Bellè added (and this is the line that stuck with me): "It's a sci-fi movie and a love story, but most of all it talks about bodies, and how they cannot be conceived apart from the emotions that inhabit them — and from their personal histories." She's identifying the actual thesis of the film: bodies aren't neutral containers. They carry memory. They carry damage.

Where You'll Watch It (And When to Expect News)

Here's the reality: Beatrice is currently in active production. No theatrical release date has been announced. No streaming platform has been attached—yet.

Most likely platforms:

Netflix — the highest probability. Fallen Leaves landed on Netflix in multiple regions, and Pöysti has existing relationships with the platform's prestige library.
MUBI — increasingly aggressive about acquiring Cannes-circuit titles. A natural home for this profile of film.
Amazon Prime Video — possible but less consistent with European art-house acquisitions.
Unlikely: SonyLIV, ZEE5, JioCinema, Hotstar (would require significant theatrical run first).

Movie OTT tracks confirmed deals across regions in real time, worth bookmarking if you want the earliest alert when distribution breaks. The site separates India-specific listings from global availability, which matters for a film like this.

Timeline expectations: A 2027 release window is most realistic. Festival premiere first (San Sebastian in September or Tallinn Black Nights in November seem natural fits given Toomla's prior San Sebastian premiere and the Estonian co-production context). Then streaming several months after. Regional language dubbing is almost certainly not happening. English subtitles will be the primary access mode.

What This Film Is Really Asking

Strip away the body-swap hook and Beatrice is asking something most love stories won't touch: What if the person you love becomes unrecognizable? Not metaphorically. Literally. And what if she's the same person inside but you can't see that because you're looking at a stranger's face?

I keep coming back to the husband's perspective. Does he believe her when she tells him who she is? Does he want to believe her? That question, the gap between recognition and faith, is where the film will either earn its ambitions or collapse under them. Hard to say which without seeing the final cut, but Toomla's track record suggests he won't flinch.

This is closer to Possession (1981) or Under the Skin (2014) in its use of body-swap as emotional metaphor, rather than a clean romance with a speculative twist. If you went deep on either of those films, if you appreciated how they used genre mechanics to ask questions about identity and ownership, this will likely pull you in.

What to Watch For Before Release

Next milestone: A trailer will likely drop ahead of a major festival submission. That's your clearest signal of when the film is actually locked and how confident the producers are about distribution.

Sales agent attachment at a major market (Berlin, Cannes, or the American Film Market in November) will tell you whether international distributors are bidding. That's the bet Tanel Tatter and the Apollo team seem confident will happen.

Streaming deal announcement. When it lands, Movie OTT will have India-specific availability tracked separately from global rollout, an important distinction for a film that might hit Netflix US before Netflix India, or vice versa.

The thing nobody mentions about actor-driven European co-productions is that they live or die on distribution timing. A film this caliber could vanish into a festival circuit and never reach streaming. Or it could land on a major platform and find an audience that never expected it to exist. Given the cast and Toomla's festival history, I'd bet on the latter, but stranger things happen in acquisition.

The Real Question

Is Beatrice worth your attention? Yes. Not because body-swap stories are inherently interesting (they're not, and most of them collapse under their own premise). But because this one has Pöysti, who just proved she can anchor an entire film with almost no dialogue. It has Bellè and Võigemast, both of whom know how to make discomfort visible. And it has a director who isn't afraid to let scenes sit in territory that makes audiences squirm.

The part I'm most curious about is whether Toomla will let the body-swap remain unexplained or whether the near-future setting implies some technological mechanism, because that single choice will determine whether Beatrice lands as allegory or as science fiction, and those are two very different films with two very different audiences.

That combination—cast, director, source material—is rare enough that it's worth tracking the project now, before the trailer drops and everyone else catches up.

Watch the official trailer: