Genre: Thriller
Premise: Facing the prospect of permanently losing her hearing, a music teacher gets an artificially intelligent cochlear implant that convinces her to commit mass murder.
About: What would you do if the only thing that gave you meaning in this world was to be taken away forever? — If there was an experimental procedure, with untold risks, that could prevent that scenario, would you undertake it? — Murder In Grave is a slow burn thriller, that has been crafted with the sole purpose of emotionally strangling the main character from page one until fade out. A hurdles race where the obstacles get higher and faster the further you go on. — Naturally, as the stakes increase, something always has to give.
Writer: Branko Maksic
Details: 97 pages
It’s been a rough stretch on the site the last couple of weeks as I’ve been handing out “wasn’t for mes” like Kanye MAGA tweets. I’ve actually started to wonder if I’m the problem. Have I read so much that nothing excites me anymore?
Uhhhh… NO!
Tie a cinder block to that hypothesis and throw it in the Mississippi River. I actually don’t need that much from a story to enjoy it. I don’t need major twists. I don’t need subject matter I’ve never seen before. I just need characters who are compelling and feel truthful, and a simple story told well.
Are you hearing me!?
No?
Maybe you need to check your hearing then. :)
Former FBI agent Deborah Holian was at the Oklahoma City Federal Building on that fateful day in 1995 when it blew up. She survived, but lost 90% of her hearing. Due to the power of technology, however, she now wears hearing aids that are so good, she can teach her second love, music.
Unfortunately, Deborah receives the bad news that that final 10% of her hearing is about to go. And when that happens, hearing aids won’t be able to help. But the doctor suggests an alternative. A beta program that requires doctors to fuse an advanced form of “artificially intelligent” hearing aids directly to the brain. If it works, she’ll be able to hear like normal people again.
Deborah goes for it, and is initially thrilled with the results. She can hear her husband, Gene, again. She can hear her son, Jacob, who’s just about to have a baby with his wife. It’s all good under the hood.
That is until Hank arrives. “Hank” is the voice that appears inside of the high-tech hearing aids and starts talking to Deborah. Hank is an asshole. He wants Deborah to do things for him, the first of which is to go to Home Depot. When Deborah refuses, she gets a call from Jacob that his newborn son is missing!
Now that Hank has Deborah’s attention, he says if she wants to see her grandson again, she’ll make that Home Depot run. Long story short, Hank gets Deborah to build a few bombs and plant them at a local park during a busy day. The bombs blow up and a lot of people are killed.
Because Hank is an asshole, he kills the baby as well, and then Gene. By this point, Deborah realizes that Hank is a real person and vows to find him and kill him. But she fails. Hank and his crew of hearing aid avengers kill her instead. The End.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, Murder in Grave was yet another script where I had a tough time buying into the concept. From the idea that the hearing aids were artificially intelligent to a disembodied voice being able to order our hero around. It’s not the most unbelievable premise I’ve come across. But there was a casualness to the execution that had me constantly skeptical that any of what I was reading would go down in real life.
Branko’s choice of making Hank a grade-A asshole from the start (his first line is “Wake up, Deborah… I said wake up you fucking cunt.”) was the wrong one. It would’ve been way more interesting if Hank had to first earn Deborah’s trust. Start him off being nice and slowly manipulating her over time, until he eventually became the asshole. The choice to make him a dick from minute 1 to minute 90 made him on-the-nose, unbelievable, and uninteresting.
The script also had a bunch of singular issues that, on their own, weren’t script killers, but when you added them all up, made script death inevitable. Take for instance the opening. Having our hero lose her hearing in the Oklahoma City Federal Building bombing was way over-the-top. And it had nothing to do with the rest of the story.
Writers often think they need HUGE REASONS for everything because THIS IS A MOVIE and BIG THINGS HAPPEN IN MOVIES. And while there are certain situations where that makes sense, most of the time something simple will do. We’re talking about hearing loss here. It could’ve been dealt with genetically.
The only relevant-to-the-story information that comes out of that opening is that our hero was an FBI agent. But not only does it take half the script for us to learn this (she’s described in the opening only as a “woman”), but her being an FBI agent has zero effect on the story other than it kinda gives her a little more knowledge of how to investigate where Hank is in those final 20 pages.
If you’re going to assign big labels to your character, those labels need to pay off in a big way. An FBI agent implies a lot to the reader. So to throw that out there and then barely use it is either confusing or sloppy.
Then there were very suspect choices such as killing a baby. Baby-killing is not encouraged. It did work in Thelma, one of my favorite movies of the year, but that death was so carefully set up throughout the screenplay that it made sense when it finally happened. Here, it just seems like we’re killing babies for shock value.
After the dead baby, our main character goes off to get revenge and… fails? They kill her? It was at this point where my head dropped and I just started shaking it. I mean, you already killed a baby. Now you’re not even going to allow the audience the satisfaction of having our hero kill the person who killed the baby?
Even besides that, this is a silly fun genre premise. You don’t kill the main character at the end of a silly premise. You’re not making Braveheart here. You’re making a movie where artificially intelligent hearing aids tell people to kill. At the end of these movies, your hero wins.
There’s actually a great example of this argument during the recent Rampage press tour. The Rock’s character originally died at the end of that script. When The Rock read it and found that out, he told the filmmakers, “If my character dies, I’m not doing this movie.” And the writers and director actually tried to convince him that it was the right choice. He finally shot back an answer that, sadly, showed that The Rock knew more about screenwriting than the professional writers working on that movie: “There’s a crocodile the size of a football stadium in this movie. We’re not making Saving Private Ryan.”
Anyway, this is a tough review to give because there isn’t any one fix that I can point to here for Branko. It’s more of a tonal thing and learning how to make choices that are more organic to the story you’re telling. Hopefully me highlighting some of these choices helps.
Curious to know what you guys think.
Script link: Murder In Grave
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: When constructing characters, consider not only where they start, but where they end. If they start as a crazy weird motherfucker and end as a crazy weird motherfucker, that character probably isn’t going to be interesting. That was my issue with Hank. He starts off as a raging asshole and he never changes. Had he started in a nicer (albeit still manipulative) place and then gradually became a raging asshole, now you have a more dynamic character. This is not the case for every character, guys. And the smaller the character, the less you need to worry about this tip. But you should definitely consider it for all of your big characters.
