Genre: Thriller/Mystery
Premise: Psychologist Dr. Martin Park specializes in working with clients trying to curtail extreme violent urges. However, when a series of brutally murdered bodies are discovered in his small New England hometown, it’s up to Martin to figure out which of his patients is responsible.
About: This script finished in the bottom third of last year’s Black List. The writer has a previous credit, a small movie called, Twelve Days of Christmas. He seems to like numbers in his titles.
Writer: Michael Boyle
Details: 109 pages
We gotta cast John Cho in this, right?
Did somebody say….. MURRRRRDERRRR?
Ooh, that sounds like a delicious appetizer.
The entree? A little something called SERIAL KILLING.
One of the most reliable spec script subject matters in the biz. Yes, I said ‘biz’ instead of business. Deal with it.
You know what I’ve been noticing? A lot of writers are writing to rounded-off page counts. So, they write 90 pages. Or 100 pages. Or, in today’s case, 110 pages. But, what they actually do is they write one page less (89, 99, 109) so that, with the title page, the PDF doc rounds it out to 90, 100, 110.
I actually think this is a good strategy. It feels more purposeful, like you have discipline. As opposed to if you have some sloppy page count like “114.” Who writes a 114 page script?? Dare I say that person is a psychopath?
Oh, look at that! A perfect segue into today’s script. :)
We’re in a small beautiful town called Raven Lake. Dr. Marvin Park (Korean-American), who’s come here with his gorgeous wife Jessica, is a world-famous psychiatrist who’s known for his best-selling book on how to spot serial killers. Marvin has parlayed that success into becoming the GO-TO guy who treats people with murderous tendencies.
Unfortunately for Raven Lake, that means a bunch of psychopaths have moved into town so they can be treated by him. Marvin’s little practice is going great until his secretary, Zoe, is dismembered and her body pieces spread out all around the office (her arm is even used as a fifth fan blade).
This brings suicidal FBI agent Helaine Ross into the mix. Ross, who’s only doing this job to stave off a shot to the head for a while, immediately starts blaming Martin for this problem. He brought these serial killers to town and now one of them is finally wreaking havoc.
The potential killers include Fred Vasquez, who loves to mix sex and violence. There’s Terry Tomlinson, a closeted black gay man who wants to kill men. There’s Kyle Egan who’s obsessed with his mailman and has lots of dreams about killing him. There’s Dustin Kelly who feels an inherent need to kill any woman who dares to dress provocatively. And there are a couple more suspects.
Once a second victim is killed by burning him alive then roasting marshmallows above his burning body, Martin realizes that this is a lot worse than he thought. You see, Martin’s flaw is that he believes he’s a miracle worker. He believes his work keeps these people from acting out their urges. In order for Martin to help Ross, he’s going to have to come to terms with his worst fear: That there’s someone he wasn’t able to help.
Today’s script suffers from a type of problem that’s hard to explain. The best word I can use to describe it is: inelegance. We’re dealing with intense subject matter – killing – that’s being balanced out through comedy. That requires a deft touch as a writer. If you get even a little sloppy, the ruse is up. We can see behind the curtain. That’s where the inelegance comes in.
For example, the first person who gets killed is Zoe, Martin’s secretary. Not only is she killed, she’s dismembered in horrifying fashion, her body parts spread throughout the waiting room. A day after this happens, Martin asks his wife, Jessica, to fill in for her until he finds somebody permanent.
I know that, at first, Martin is insistent that one of his patients is not the killer. But even so, your job as a husband, first and foremost, is to protect your wife. To place her in the very same situation that led to the brutal killing of his previous secretary doesn’t make any sense whatsoever.
The writer might argue that to do this is funny. Because it’s so ridiculous. Of course you would never place your wife in such a dangerous position. But I’m not buying that. When the writer uses humor as an excuse to do illogical things, they’ve lost me. You do not get to lean on the comedy-card to get away with weak story developments.
And then you had stuff like Agent Ross, who we see putting a gun to her head to kill herself just before she gets the phone call to join this case. Tonally, that’s too dark. Way too dark. You’re using humor when it’s convenient (hey wifey, I need you to take the position that just ended in another attractive woman being hideously murdered) and darkness when it’s convenient (Ross’s suicidal tendencies feel like they were pulled from a deleted scene in Requiem for a Dream).
This is what I mean by inelegance. If you’re aiming for a complex tone, you can’t miss. You can’t run a restaurant that serves Olive Garden bread rolls, grade-A prime rib steak, and cinnamon sticks for dessert. It’s gotta be all one thing or all another.
Despite these choices, I was hanging on to this script with the tips of my fingernails because I wanted it to work so badly. Every once in a while, the script would have a moment that pulled me back in, such as some funny dialogue.
But then the script would revert back to another dream sequence. Dream sequences are one of the BIGGEST indicators of weak screenwriting. Unless they’re baked into the story (Nightmare on Elm Street), out of 10,000 scripts I’ve read, there have been maybe 3 that have used dream sequences effectively. There’s something inherently sloppy about them. And if you have any doubts about that analysis, ask yourself if any of your current favorite films use dream sequences. They don’t. They’re the screenwriting equivalent of nuclear waste.
So what about who the killer was? Good reveal?
Unfortunately not. The writer telegraphs who the killer is almost from the very first moment they enter the story. Granted, it’s hard to surprise an audience these days with a killer reveal. We just talked about that on The Best and The Brightest. But it’s possible. It just takes work. You have to push yourself beyond the obvious choices.
This script needed more of a deft touch to handle the tone it was going for. In yesterday’s script, the writer knew EXACTLY what he was going for. As a result, his script felt confident the whole way through. Here, the writer doesn’t know what kind of movie he’s writing so the story feels a lot less sure of itself. What do I mean by less sure of itself? I’ll give you an easy comp: Amsterdam. The tone of that movie was all-over-the-place. It was often unclear where the comedy stopped and the drama began. I felt the same thing here.
I’m not saying you can’t make these scripts work. I thought The Voices (the script more than the movie), captured this tricky tone well. But because the tone can feel like a moving target, if you don’t have an ASSURED PLAN for the execution, it will unravel on you quickly.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: The reason I hate dream sequences so much is that you only have 50 scenes in a script. Each scene, then, is precious. You should want to put the best possible scene forward in each of those 50 slots. If you add a dream sequence – a sequence that doesn’t push the story forward and only operates as a flashy momentary distraction – you are wasting one of those precious 50 slots.
