Genre: Contained Thriller/Apocalypse
Premise: In the near future when air-supply is scarce, a mother and daughter fight for survival when two strangers arrive desperate for an oxygenized safe haven.
About: This script finished on last year’s Black List, just below the top 20. Doug Simon co-created the 2010 TV show “Brotherhood” and co-wrote the 2015 horror movie, “Demonic,” starring Frank Grillo.
Writer: Doug Simon
Details: 97 pages
I’m expecting contained thrillers/horrors/sci-fiers to be well represented in The Last Great Screenplay Contest. Writers know that everyone is looking for the next great contained flick cause they’re cheap to produce and easy to market. They’re also some of the easiest reads (low character count, easy to understand situations) meaning lots of people will give them a shot. And, of course, there are tons of production houses who can afford them (compared to if you write a 250 million dollar superhero script, where there are only two places you can go with that). So I’m always happy to read the latest contained script. Even if it’s no good, there’s always something to learn from them.
40 year old Joel lives in a bunker with his father, Mike, his wife, Amy, and his 18 year old daughter, Megan. These four are surviving in a world that’s gone airless. Or, at least, oxygen-less. Luckily, Joel was one of those weirdo survivalist people who prepared for the apocalypse. So while everyone else died, he had his family high-fiving over bunker dinners within a week.
Unfortunately, at the beginning of our story, while Joel and Mike are looking for things in their abandoned farmhouse, Mike falls through the weakened floor and loses his oxygen backpack. These backpacks, which offer 2-5 hours of air, are the only way you can survive up top. Joel fails to save his father before his oxygen tank runs out, and after informing the fam of the accident, insists on burying his father next to his mother in a cemetery.
That cemetery is over two hours walking distance though. And in this world, two hours is a long time. If something goes wrong, you won’t have enough oxygen to get back home. And that’s what happens. Joel leaves and never comes back. Cut to five months later where Amy and Megan are holding up the fort by themselves. That’s going well until two mysterious people show up – Tess and stupid Lucas, claiming to have known Joel.
Tess knows Joel was an engineer. She and Lucas are part of a small group of people living in a similar larger system miles away. Tess wants to come in and inspect dad’s oxygen system in the hopes of understanding it better so they can go back and fix their own dying oxygen system. Amy is having none of it but Megan believes them, or at least wants to. It’s a lonely existence they live. If there are other people out there, that changes things.
After a drawn out Q&A and several precautionary measures, Amy opens the bunker door, only to have a new guy, Micah, fly out of nowhere into the bunker. Amy manages to slam the door shut, keeping Tessa and Lucas out. But now they have to fight off this crazed Micah dude. Megan, whose father trained her for situations just like this, pulls out a gun and shoots him in the shoulder, putting him on the ground. They’ve contained this situation. But Tess and Lucas are still outside, determined to get in at all costs. And to give them some incentive, they each have only 45 minutes left on their oxygen packs. Things are about to get messy.
Number 1 rule of Contained Thriller Club. Give us scenarios unique to your concept! If you have a world where you can’t make a sound or monsters kill you, think up scenarios where your characters have to make noise and deal with the consequences.
I will give “Breathe” this. It embraces Rule Number 1 of Contained Thriller Club with a vengeance. There are a good fifteen sequences in this script where people get themselves in situations where their oxygen is cut off or limited and they have to fix the problem or die. This created a ton of “ticking time bombs” that kept the script MOVING.
But there’s an issue with the setup. Running out of oxygen is not a new idea. We see it all the time in movies. Especially space movies and underwater flicks. So even though the writer, Doug Simon, is doing the right thing – engaging in scenarios that take advantage of his concept – it all feels a bit familiar.
That means we get a mixed bag of oxygen-starved scenarios. For example, the bad guys clog one of the vents up top, creating a 15 minute countdown inside the bunker to find a solution or run out of air – a situation that feels way too familiar. But it also gives us a scene where Megan, who wants to know what’s really going on with these people, puts the injured Micah in an airless room and promises to pump in one minute of oxygen for every question he answers truthfully. That was certainly a more entertaining scene than what we usually get, which is to tie the bad guy to a chair and ask him questions.
Despite its weaknesses, the script stays strong throughout most of its 97 page running time (a good page length for a contained thriller). Killing off the father after we’d gotten to know him made us way more sympathetic to Megan and Amy than had Dad only been someone referred to in dialogue. So I was engaged in most of the “oxygen running out scenarios” if only to make sure these two made it out alive.
But the writer makes a choice in the third act that we need to talk about because it’s something all contained thriller writers will face. Third acts are supposed to be BIGGER. Not just in contained thrillers. In all scripts. This is the ending. You want it to feel big and exciting. So the question you run up against is: Do you stay true to your contained thriller setup or do you move out of it in order to give the viewer that big fancy finale? Simon decided to go big and I think it hurts the script.
We get this whole third act where Amy has to take an electric car to the place where her husband died to get a key card to get back into the bunker, which at this point she was locked out of. Yeah, this adds a bigger, arguably, more exciting ending. But it also no longer feels like a contained thriller.
I’ve heard the saying that when you give someone your concept, you’re signing a contract with them to deliver on that concept. Once you move out of that concept, you’ve broken the contract.
To be fair, sometimes the contract is gray enough that it’s up to the writer to decide where the line is. But the moment I was the most invested in this screenplay was when we had one injured bad guy inside, with Amy and Megan, and two determined bad guys outside who needed to get in within the next 45 minutes or they would run out of oxygen. This occurred at about the midpoint and set up a perfect real-time story for the last half of the screenplay. And it was a good setup! All the motivations made sense. They were organic to the story. And you had this sweet x-factor inside the bunker in the third guy. So there were potential pitfalls everywhere. I would’ve been happy had we stayed with that setup.
But I get it. The thing all of us writers are terrified of is boring the reader. It’s our worst fear. This can lead us to inject sequences and storylines that, on the surface, solve this problem. But they’re often fool’s gold. Sometimes you have to trust that the situation you set up is capable of delivering.
Despite that, this script had more good than bad and I’d say it’s worth reading, especially for contained thriller writers who want to get better.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: When you write contained stories, make sure there are things for your characters to do before the main conflict (in this case, the bad guys) arrives. For example, here they have to check the oxygen levels every 12 hours. They have to go outside and clean the solar panels. Everybody has jobs. The reason for this is: IT KEEPS YOUR CHARACTERS ACTIVE. And this is important when there’s nothing interesting going on yet. Because at least your characters aren’t sitting around, playing cards, having boring conversations. Seven pages of stillness could be the difference between the reader closing your script or continuing to read it.
