Following her delightfully deadpan turn in her role as Violet in Brad Silberling’s big screen adaptation of Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, Emily Browning is looking to more mature climes, and if the news as reported The Playlist is anything to go by, she’ll have a very different type of role to play in her next film.

Billed as ‘sex-drama’ Sleeping Beauty is a ‘haunting erotic’ tale of a student drifting into prostitution and whose downward spiral finds its nadir when she becomes a Sleeping Beauty – a woman who lies, drugged, in a chamber and has men do anything they want to her, while she wakes up the next morning none the wiser.

Australian Novelist Julia Leigh wrote the film, which she will direct as her feature debut, and when speaking to FilmMaker Magazine in 2008 she gave some insight into her lead character,

She definitely flies in the face of more Hollywood-type scripts that demand detailed backstories and absolute clarity of motivation…I‘m not a fan of backstory in general and I‘m an enemy of the ‘psychological explanation‘ tied to some event in the past. Instead I like that feeling of the submerged, the ‘tip of the iceberg‘ feeling we get about a character on screen, something latent. Something fascinating.

Browning replaces Mia Wasikowska, who will be seen as Alice in Tim Burton’s foray into Wonderland next month.