Alexis Jacknow spent more than a decade directing theatre before she made a feature film, and it shows in the one she made. Clock is a horror film about a woman being told her body is malfunctioning because she does not want a child — a premise that works on stage logic rather than jump scares, and one that put Jacknow on every serious list of 2023 genre debuts.
Quick Bio / At a Glance
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Name | Alexis Jacknow |
| Based In | Los Angeles, California |
| Occupation | Director, writer, actress |
| Background | Over a decade directing theatre, including national tours |
| Feature Debut | Clock (2023), writer and director |
| Based On | Her own 2020 short film of the same name |
| Lead Cast | Dianna Agron and Melora Hardin |
| Festival | Audience Award, Overlook Film Festival |
| Short Films | Again, Costume Change, Overnight |
| Recognition | WGA Award nomination; 2024 Black List script AIDa |
A Theatre Director First
Ten Years on Stage
Before film, Jacknow accumulated more than a decade of theatre directing credits, including national tours and world premieres. She also directed radio plays, work that won an Audie Award — a background in audio storytelling that is visible in how Clock uses sound.
Directors who arrive in features from theatre tend to trust performance over spectacle. That is the defining characteristic of her filmmaking.
Short Films and the Tribeca Debut
Her debut short, Again, premiered in competition at the Tribeca Film Festival and was distributed by Amazon. She followed it with Costume Change for FX and Freeform and Overnight for Paramount+, which earned her a Writers Guild of America award nomination in short form original.
Clock (2023)
From Short to Feature
Jacknow first made Clock as a short in 2020, then expanded it into her feature debut. That progression — proving a concept at short length, then building it out — is increasingly how genre directors break through, and she executed it cleanly.
The Premise
The film follows a woman who enrols in a clinical trial to repair what she and everyone around her have decided is a broken biological clock. She does not want children. Friends, family and the wider culture treat that as a malfunction requiring correction.
Dianna Agron leads, with Melora Hardin in support. The horror comes from consent and autonomy rather than from a monster, which is why it read to critics as a body-horror film about social pressure.
Reception
Clock premiered at the Overlook Film Festival, where it took the Audience Award, and was named among the best horror films of 2023 by outlets including People, Variety, Collider, Esquire and Marie Claire.
Audience scores were more divided than critical ones — a common pattern for horror that withholds conventional payoffs.
What She Is Working On
Her most recent feature script, AIDa, made the 2024 Black List — the annual industry survey of the most-liked unproduced screenplays, and one of the more reliable predictors of what gets made next.
Why She Is Worth Watching
Jacknow belongs to a cohort of directors using horror to argue about bodily autonomy, and she arrived at it from stage craft rather than from film school genre fandom. That gives her work a different texture: closer, quieter, more dependent on the actor’s face than on the edit.
One feature is a small sample. It was a distinctive enough one that the second will be watched carefully.
More profiles from behind the camera: Gracie Frances Penner and Simon Luckinbill.
