Famke Janssen Joins Post-Apocalyptic Thriller One Second After

A new storm is bubbling on the cinematic horizon. Imagine a world where every screen goes dead, every signal dies, and society’s hinge snaps. That is the harsh landscape of One Second After, and now Famke Janssen is stepping into that world.

MPI Original Films is bringing to life William R. Forstchen’s novel, but in this live-action version the stakes feel freshly lethal. Technology, our safety net, becomes the first casualty. An electromagnetic pulse sweeps through, severing power grids, communications, engines, everything we lean on. Civilization is peeled back to its bones. In that vacuum, people scramble for order, for hope, for the chance to not lose everything.

Janssen takes on the role of Mayor Kate Lindsey. In a world turned upside down, she becomes a political anchor when chaos reigns. Will she hold the line or bend under pressure? That question pulses like a heartbeat in the film’s core.

She joins a cast built on survival grit: Josh Holloway as John Matherson, a former military man turned defender of his community, and Hannah John-Kamen as Makalya, a nurse battling on the frontlines of collapse. Mary McDonnell also weaves into the tense tapestry. Together they navigate ruined towns, fractured alliances, and desperate choices.

When the film starts, we’re already deep into the fallout. The roads are empty. The circuits dead. The future, unclear. As resources dwindle, every decision weighs like a stone. Who to trust? How to lead? What morality survives when law and order vanish?

The production team is smart to adapt this through a cinematic lens. They don’t appear focused on recreating every page of the book. Instead, they’re likely zeroing in on character tension, visual collapse, and the haunting silence that follows the EMP. The landscape itself becomes a character, trees dark, wires dead, towns hollow. In that emptiness, people will need more than food and water; they’ll need leadership, conviction, and grit.

Janssen as mayor adds weight. She’s played powerful, complex characters before. Here, she has the chance to embody a calm center in the storm, someone who doesn’t bow easily. Her presence suggests the film will take governance, community, and moral burden seriously. She won’t just be a figurehead. She’ll have to make choices with no good options, like many of us would in that moment of blackout.

The director, Scott Rogers, and scribe J. Michael Straczynski are betting on tone. The collapse of modern life is the canvas. The people are the brushstrokes. Viewers should expect tense set pieces, moments of eerie stillness, and the fear that every turn of the road could hold danger. The film will ride the tension between order and anarchy, between hope and utter loss.

If the lights go out, what do we become? That is One Second After’s haunting question. And with Famke Janssen’s casting, the film promises a performance that anchors the chaos. We’re not watching from a safe distance. We’re walking the dark streets, too.