Thrillers set inside an emergency call center have a peculiar pedigree. Gustav Möller’s The Guilty trapped a Danish dispatcher in one room with a phone line, and Antoine Fuqua’s Netflix remake handed the headset to Jake Gyllenhaal, the same actor Greg Yaitanes directed in Apple TV+’s Presumed Innocent. Yaitanes’s next feature returns to that switchboard, with The White Lotus breakout Brittany O’Grady at the console and an entire city on the other end of the line.

As Deadline first reported, FilmNation Entertainment is launching sales on State of Emergency at the American Film Market through Infrared Pictures, its genre production label. O’Grady stars, and Yaitanes directs from a script by Nick Luddington, a writer on Arcane. It is the kind of package a sales floor understands at a glance: a director whose résumé is built on event television, a lead coming off prestige drama, and a premise that fits on a single index card.

That premise centers on Jenna, a Boston 911 emergency dispatcher who returns to her job still haunted by the death of her teenage brother and the missed call he placed to her in his final moments. An ordinary overnight shift turns when callers begin reporting strange incidents connected to a mysterious event in Boston Harbor. As a threat closes in on the dispatch center itself, the official synopsis lands on its hook: “Boston is ground zero for a catastrophe.”

Yaitanes is a Golden Globe and Emmy winner whose television credits carry real audience weight. He was co-executive producer on HBO’s House of the Dragon and directed three episodes, including the season finale that drew HBO’s largest global audience ever. He served as executive producer and director on Presumed Innocent, Apple TV+’s most-watched drama, and won an Emmy for House. His most recent directing work includes Lucky, Dutton Ranch and Spider-Noir.

O’Grady has spent the period since The White Lotus mixing auteur work with genre. She appeared in Kathryn Bigelow‘s A House of Dynamite, starred in the genre title Monitor and in HBO Max’s The Comeback, and has Jumanji: Open World on the way.

Infrared is financing State of Emergency and producing alongside Sam Brown and Dustin Thomason through their company Curiosity Media. Cameras are expected to roll in 2027. “I’m excited to reunite with my longtime collaborators Dustin Thomason and Sam Brown, and to work with a rising talent like Brittany O’Grady,” Yaitanes said. “The thriller genre has been a lifelong passion of mine.” FilmNation founder and CEO Glen Basner called Infrared “a champion of bold genre films” and described the project as a “high-stakes, survival thriller.”

The image that sells the film is not the harbor or the catastrophe but the phone: a dispatcher who once missed the one call that mattered, now answering every call a city in crisis can make.