Nicholl-winning script!
Genre: Supernatural/Love Story/Drama
Premise: (from Black List) Aden was born with a rare condition where he becomes invisible to those who love him. He struggles when he falls in love with his childhood best friend.
About: This script finished in the middle of this year’s Black List, which was released last week. You can see my assessment of every idea on the list here. This script won the 2024 Nicholl Fellowship. Kayla Sun is a writer-director who is expanding a short film of hers called, “Velare.”
Writer: Kayla Sun
Details: 97 pages
Finn Wolfhard for Aden?
I heard a few of you discussing how much you liked this one in the comments.
I’m glad you did because, otherwise, I probably wouldn’t have read it. I thought the logline had a lot of problems.
“Aden was born with a rare condition where he becomes invisible to those who love him. He struggles when he falls in love with his childhood best friend.”
It sounds drifty. Young-Adult’ish. Unsure of itself. Lightweight. There’s a big idea here. There’s even the beginnings of a concept. But it ultimately feels like one of those scripts where the writer operates more on feel than craft. Like they’re going to discover the story along the way instead of it being meticulously plotted, like the way Conclave (which I just watched) was.
Hopefully, I’m wrong. But we’ll see!
7 year old Aden has lived a unique life, one in which his family can’t even see him because of his condition – a rare unnamed condition where you are unseen by those who love you. As a result, Aden has always needed to keep people at arm’s length. That’s because the closer they get to him, the less visible he becomes, until he’s vanished entirely.
Therefore, it’s non-love at first sight when he meets Velare, a hardcore sociopath (we know this because other school children mention it) who despises everyone. Since there is no fear of Velare liking him, Aden pushes for friendship. She never really accepts this but allows him to hang around anyway.
Then, one day, Velare comes home to find that her crazy father killed her mother then shot himself. As Velare is being whisked off by the police, she spots Aden and tells him she never wants to see him again.
Cut to 11 years later and Aden is working as an assistant private detective. When a client comes in and says that someone is stealing other people’s personal items that don’t have any monetary value, he’s on the case.
This eventually leads to him finding Adult Velare, who is working for a psychic. Velare takes us into a flashback of her childhood from her POV. We learn that Velare has a power as well. She can see how people die just by touching them. So she knew years ahead of time that her dad would kill her mom. She knew years ahead of time that zoo tigers would maul her foster parents.
Back as a 7 year old, we see her getting to know Aden, him slowly becoming more transparent to her, and her coming to the conclusion that he must be an imaginary friend. That’s why she told him she never wanted to see him again! Cause she was done being a child and didn’t want imaginary friends anymore.
Cut back to the present and we gradually learn that Velare is stealing personal items from people around town, but not to hurt them, to SAVE THEM. For example, when she touches a man and learns that he dies by running into his burning building to save his precious books, she preemptively steals the books so that he’ll never run into the fire in the first place.
But can these two and their quirky existences mesh into an actual relationship? Or is the universe so brazenly conspiring against them that love has no chance?
Let me start by painting a positive assessment of this story. This is unlike any love story you’ve ever read before. It is its own unique thing. It has its own unique tone. If you like offbeat love stories, stuff like “Wristcutters,” there’s a chance you’ll be into this.
In addition to this, you have a morsel of a compelling concept at the center of your script. That being, what if people couldn’t see you once they loved you? How would that affect the way you interacted with everyone? You would want to get close to others, but also keep them at arms’ length because the more they liked you, the less they saw you. I’m not saying that the script explored this idea in the most effective way, but it is a compelling idea.
Now let me paint a more objective view of this story. This script felt entirely inauthentic from the jump. You could always tell that a writer was writing it. In place of authentic human moments, you got manufactured unrealistic developments that never seemed genuine.
For example, our female lead can see others’ deaths by touching them. So we see the murder of her mother. We see her foster parents get mauled by zoo tigers. We see someone get accidentally shot by a kindergartener playing with a gun. We see someone die in a fire. These are the types of things that don’t happen to the everyday person. They only happen when writers with big imaginations who are trying to create giant affecting moments write them. That Velare only seemed to know people who died in these fantastical ways was ridiculous. Why didn’t anybody die in a bed of, you know, old age?
This is the act that writers go through, especially when they’re younger, whereby they force things into the script that aren’t based in reality. Even if you try and make the argument that this concept itself isn’t based in reality, you still have to ground most elements of your story. Not everything can be fantastical. This is not an animated film. It’s supposed to be set in the real world.
That was my big problem with Boy Girl Fig. Nothing in it is based in reality. From multiple superhero characters to jobs that no average person would have to deaths that only exist in one’s wildest imagination. There’s no ground underneath the story. It’s all floating up in the air.
If you want to emotionally affect an audience, you need to base some aspect of your story in reality so that people can relate to it. I never related to anything here and that’s why I didn’t like it.
There are aspects of this script that are going to be visually powerful in the final film. For example, due to the fact that his parents can’t see Aden, they must tie an orange balloon to him. Certain people are in different stages of how much they care for Aden and, therefore, Aden is of varying opaqueness to all these people. I could see how that would look intriguing in a trailer.
But the world, and subsequent rules, the writer creates for this story are so unbelievable that I was never close to suspending my disbelief. It wasn’t for me.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: The second I pick up on something that doesn’t feel genuine in a script, I get worried. I don’t give up on the script right then and there. But if I see another example of the same thing, I will lose faith in the script quickly. Early on, a seven year old says this, “But you know, my point is, fig does have flowers. I read it in a book yesterday. Their flowers just grow inward. They are the sticky things you see when you cut a fig open. Isn’t that interesting? Do they teach that at school?”
There is no world in which a 7 year old talks like this. It’s a small thing but actually a big thing. Cause it set the precedent for a number of moments in the script that weren’t believable.
