Seven meets Weapons meets Pluribus?
Genre: Serial Killer/Sci-Fi
Premise: An LA detective begins to suspect that a series of murders and suicides is tied to a group that’s figured out how to jump into another person’s body.
About: This spec sold to BoulderLight Pictures, the coolest hippest production company in town. They’re the Zach Cregger adjacent outfit. They produced both Barbarian and one of my favorite movies from last year, Companion. The buzzy sci-fi tale comes from someone who worked with the buzzy sci-fi guru himself, J.J. Abrams.
Writer: Isaac Louis García
Details: 110 pages
Chris Pine for Detective Harry?
I come across these “switching through a lot of bodies” concepts a couple of times a year. And, in every third script or so, the idea is mixed in with a serial killer premise. So I’m not unfamiliar with this setup. However, today’s writer reminds us that if no one has cracked a cool idea yet, why not take another shot at it and crack it yourself?
LA detective Harry Roth is barely keeping his head above water. A young girl has vanished without a trace. Her last known contact was an LA sleazeball named Melvin Ray, who soon after disappears himself. Digging deeper, Harry uncovers a chain of unsettling connections: Melvin was involved with a woman named Claire Kim, who later takes her own life. Claire, in turn, had ties to a UCLA scientist, Jonathan Laib. He also ends up dead by apparent suicide.
Now Harry’s attention has turned to Laib’s colleague, Genevieve Black. And with every new link in the chain, the pattern becomes harder to ignore.
Harry begins to suspect something impossible. He believes someone is transferring their consciousness from body to body. The real challenge isn’t just solving the case, but convincing his no-nonsense boss, Captain James Rhee, that any of this is real. Rhee is deeply skeptical, but even he can’t deny that the evidence points to something abnormal. Reluctantly, he gives Harry room to keep digging.
All of this unfolds against the backdrop of Harry’s strained home life. He’s married to Celine, whose adult daughter Lucy still lives with them. Lucy makes money through strange internet side hustles, including selling abstract audio recordings to an OnlyFans-like audience. She resents Harry for inserting himself into her family and makes sure he feels unwelcome at every turn.
Eventually, Harry traces the mystery to a man named Dreux, who once worked for a reclusive scientist named Isaac Gamin Astor. Astor developed a technology based on an auditory trigger that allows a person’s consciousness to jump into another body. At first, the two exploit the invention in simple ways. They hop bodies, empty bank accounts, then move on.
But Astor’s ambitions have grown far more extreme. He envisions a world where identity itself dissolves. Where everyone becomes everyone else.
Harry has no idea how close he is to the truth until his pursuit goes disastrously wrong. His own body is hijacked, and he wakes up trapped inside a little girl’s body. With time running out, Harry must find a way back and stop Astor before the technology is unleashed on the world. Whether he can pull it off… remains to be seen.
I’ve been on the lookout for a supernatural “Seven” for a long time. This script is it.
How did that movie separate itself?
What made Seven stand out wasn’t the plot mechanics. It was the detail. The lived-in quality of the world. The way the rain felt like it had a personality of its own. The script lingered in places most screenwriters would rush past without a second thought.
There were moments that seemed insignificant on paper but carried real weight because of how specifically they were rendered. A cop alone in his office. Sitting. Thinking. Not advancing the plot. Just existing. Those pauses gave the story texture. They made the world feel inhabited rather than assembled.
It felt like the kind of script that could only come from someone with time. A writer who wasn’t under contract, wasn’t racing a deadline, and didn’t feel pressure to be efficient on every page. Someone willing to let scenes breathe, to follow their curiosity, to stay with a moment a little longer than necessary.
That’s one of the underrated advantages of being a nobody screenwriter with zero deadlines. You can let your mind wander and put it on the page. And when you do, the script starts to feel less like a delivery system for plot and more like a place you can actually live in. That’s what separates something like Seven from the average script.
The character of Lucy is a good example of that same approach in Cut Outs. She’s an adult still living in her mother’s house, burrowed away in a dark, cluttered bedroom, perpetually online. Her world is narrow but deep. She’s gone far into the strange, specific corners of internet life, the kind of depths you only reach when you spend an enormous amount of time doing nothing else.
That level of specificity feels observed. It’s the sort of detail that comes from lingering on a character long enough to understand how they actually live, not just what role they serve in the story. Those small, slightly uncomfortable details help a script stand out.
Or, to put it in plain speak: This writer actually put in real effort.
Most writers put in 60-70% effort. The good ones will get to 80%. The great ones are between 90 and 100. Just like great athletes who leave it all on the field, great writers leave it all on the page. If you asked them to improve anything, they’d say, “I can’t. This is the best I can do.” That’s the feeling I got when I read this script.
I want to draw attention to a very brief moment early on where, once I read it, I knew this would be the first “worth the read” or better script on the site in a long time. Harry’s talking to Captain Rhee. He’s describing the habits of Claire who, according to her boyfriend, began acting strange all of a sudden. He says he noticed a change in her habits. She had been a bubbly, young, creative type. A late riser. Medicated. A little slovenly. But open, always open with him. Then suddenly she starts getting up at the crack of dawn and leaving the apartment before he’s awake.
This is the exchange that follows. Rhee asks, “What kind of meds she on?” Harry replies, “It’s in the dossier. Nothing relevant.” Rhee asks, “She change her medication at all?” Harry says, “I don’t know.” Rhee responds, “Go on.”
99.9% of readers will breeze right past this. But to me, it signals a writer who’s stronger than most. Here’s why. Most writers treat a screenplay as a stack of pages they need to fill in order to get their story down. When you think that way, you only focus on your objective as the writer. You aren’t thinking about the characters as living people.
The scene becomes: what do I need to accomplish here to move the story forward? And once you start thinking like that, the scene loses life. You cannot write real life if you are only trying to achieve your own objectives. Real life is full of friction. Of interruptions. Of resistance. Of people pushing back when you least expect it.
A good screenwriter understands that Rhee is in this scene too. And if you put another character in a scene, they are not there to be decorative. They have their own goals. Their own pressures. Their own motivations. Rhee’s job is to evaluate whether this theory deserves police resources in a city that barely has enough to go around. Letting Harry run with a hunch means pulling him away from some other problem that also needs attention.
Most writers would have had Rhee go silent after Harry lays out the theory. To them, the exposition about Claire is the whole point. Letting Rhee talk gets in the way of that. So they might have instead had him say, “Go on,” or “I see.” When Rhee asks what kind of medication she was on, and then follows it with, did she change it at all, that tiny moment reveals a writer who is paying attention to how people actually think and respond. As someone who reads a ton of scripts, I can promise you, that’s rare.
And that commitment to detail is present throughout the entire screenplay. And it takes what’s already a fun twisty journey into that “Seven”-type universe where LA becomes its own character. I think that’s when you know a writer is really cooking. He understands that the very environment itself is its own character.
So, does it get an “impressive?” Almost! A movie that’s this twisty and weird needs to land the plane. And we do land (and to the writer’s credit, it doesn’t go exactly how you think it will). But it’s a bumpy enough landing that I can’t give it a top grade. I think it’s a really good script though and definitely one of the best scripts I’ve reviewed on the site in a while!
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I Learned: One of the simplest ways to add real energy to a dialogue scene is to let another character push back. That tiny bit of resistance creates imbalance, and imbalance is what makes a scene feel alive. If one character is talking about a trip to the store, put someone else in the room who says, “You never go to that store.” The first character fires back, “Okay, well, I went there yesterday.” Nothing major changes. No new plot information is revealed. But the scene suddenly has texture. Any time you let a character talk uninterrupted, the dialogue starts to feel fake. Because, in real life, people don’t just rant on for ages. There’s a give and take. There’s pushback. There’s messiness.
