Today’s screenplay poses the question, “What if you could date Hal 9000?”
Genre: Thriller
Premise: After a whirlwind long-distance online romance, a once-cynical writer inherits a remote smart-house from her newly deceased new husband and discovers he might not be entirely gone after all.
About: Lauren Caris Cohan is a writer-director and this is going to be her directorial debut. This script finished with 8 votes on last year’s Black List.
Writer: Lauren Caris Cohan
Details: 112 pages
Last week was Fun Script Review Week.
We had two interesting scripts to talk about.
Will that trend continue this week?
Only time will tell. However much time it takes to get through the plot description.
The evil smart house concept is not a new one. About 15 years ago, the concept of a smart house entered the media, igniting many screenwriters to write Smart House horror scripts. I think a few of them even became movies.
But when the smart house the world promised us never came to be, people forgot about the idea. Until now. To Cohan’s credit, it’s a good time to explore this idea as we really are moving towards those concepts first imagined 15 years ago. I can turn on the lamp over by the window by yelling at Alexa to do so. And my bedroom Alexa tells me every morning how many people died from Corona virus in the last 24 hours. And some argue technology hasn’t made the world a better place.
I’m a little wary, though. How much danger can a smart house really create? I’m pretty sure by walking to the middle of the living room, Crazy House AI can’t touch you. But isn’t that the challenge of writing? Every idea has limitations. Good writers are able to find solutions to those limitations. Other writers are not.
Sheila is a 42 year-old British woman who may have stolen my quarantine to-do list since she’s apparently been watching a lot of 90 Day Fiance. Without ever having physically met Michael (she’s only talked to him online for the last 6 months) Sheila flies over to the U.S. and marries him. Immediately they head off to Michael’s lovely home in Big Sur.
Michael is rich, retired, and really into nerdy stuff. His entire house is automated. Sheila, a writer, starts working on her latest book, only to get a surprise visit from the cops. Michael’s car flew off a cliff and he died. Poor guy.
A week later, Sheila receives a white box from a company called OUROBOROS. The Ouroboros module allows Michael, whose consciousness has been downloaded to a computer, to come back to life as the home’s AI!
Sheila is weirded out at first. But after visiting Ouroboros and being assured that this is all above board, she allows Michael to come back, because what woman wouldn’t want her husband looking over her shoulder 24 hours a day? Sheila is happy for a while. But then she meets the studly local convenience store owner, Caleb. Yumma yumma.
The two clearly have chemistry but because Creepy AI Michael watches everything Sheila does, she can’t spend any meaningful adult time with him. But when she can’t ignore the need for physical connection any longer, she turns Michael off and Caleb comes over for dinner.
Sheila doesn’t realize it. But she’s just Microsoft Dossed her lover. The next day, while Sheila is out, Creepy AI Michael locks him in the freezer! And when Sheila returns, he locks her in the house as well, informing her that unless she changes her behavior, he’s going to provide the cops with irrefutable evidence that she murdered him for his money. Will Sheila wise up? Or will she burn this place to the ground?
“Aftermath” wasn’t a bad screenplay.
It just didn’t do anything exceptional in the execution.
I knew the script was in trouble when I saw a 7 line paragraph on the first page. In Cohan’s defense, I’ve seen good scripts with 7 line paragraphs in them. But even most beginner writers know that you don’t pull out a 7 line paragraph on the very first page.
The bigger issue with Aftermath is that the structure isn’t there.
When you go to a movie about a controlling killer house, what do you expect to see? I’m guessing you expect to see a controlling killer house. But the house doesn’t do anything controlling or killing until page 80.
That’s partly because Cohan had to do a lot of setup here. We had to establish this complex relationship where they met online and got married and they’re going to Michael’s house for the first time and the house is a smart house. That took a while to explain.
But the rest of the structural problems are on the writer. We spend a lot of time with Sheila heading to the city to meet with Ouroboros and asking them questions. You have a confined thriller set up. You shouldn’t be allowing your heroine to run around, willy-nilly anywhere on the planet. That’s the opposite of what you want to do with this setup. It creates a sense of freedom. It makes the audience think that Sheila can leave safely whenever she wants. Not to mention, you’re sending her out for the least dramatic reasons possible – so you can feed more exposition to the reader. If you’re going to break protocol in a screenplay, you want to do it because you have an entertaining scene idea. Not 20 Questions with a Scientist.
Another problem is there’s no sense of Sheila’s life before she moves here.
This is a common mistake beginners make so I want to discuss it. We often pick characters who don’t have a lot of friends or family because we just want to focus on our main characters. But that usually catches up to you. Take Sheila, for example. We’re supposed to believe that Sheila has no family, no friends, nobody she talks to. Her job history is limited at best. That’s not a real person. That’s a lazy writer.
That’s someone who doesn’t want to give the character a real job because that means figuring out what that job is. Which means it may shape our hero in a way we don’t quite like. It means figuring out how long she’s had that job. If she likes that job. If getting that job was part of her life plan. If it wasn’t, where did things go wrong? It means knowing who she worked with. Some of those people would likely be friends. Why do all that when you can just not do it? Not doing it is easier, right?
But I promise you this. If you’re making a decision in a script because it means less work for you, 99% of the time your script will be worse for it.
I especially get suspicious when a character’s job is writing. A writer will often make this choice for two reasons. One, the writer knows this job well. And two, you don’t have to give a writer any responsibilities or have them need to be anywhere ever. This provides a false sense of security because now you don’t have to worry about a character’s schedule or have them be anywhere. You have total freedom. Which is also why it’s a bad idea. Total freedom is the opposite of everyone who’s going to watch your movie. They all have jobs. They all have lives. They all have friends. So watching some person who’s sitting around all day doing nothing is going to be both un-relatable and unentertaining.
Stephen King makes all his characters writers but Stephen King would be the first to tell you he does this because he’s lazy. And also, he’s one of the most creative people ever. So he’s able to make up for it.
All of these things resulted in a script that was too laid back. This thing never got out of third gear and spent most of its time in second. You have to at least hit fourth gear in your movie. And, preferably, you should have a couple of fifth gear moments.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: One of the biggest sins you can commit as a writer is promising a cool concept then not exploiting what’s unique about that concept at all. This is a movie about an evil smart house. The most original thing the smart house does to attack its occupants in “An Aftermath” is lock someone in a freezer. That’s like if Jurassic Park had a single dinosaur scene where a stegosaurus stole the hero’s spaghetti.
