Genre: Erotic Thriller
Premise: A couples therapist is drawn into a dangerous triangle of lust, lies and manipulation when she begins an affair with a stranger—who turns out to be the husband of her new client.
About: This script was a spec script that was purchased by New Regency. The writers, Erika Vázquez & Siena Butterfield, wrote on the Netflix hit, Wednesday.
Writers: Erika Vázquez & Siena Butterfield
Details: 110 pages
Kendrick for Pau?
Today’s script actually covers a lot of great screenwriting topics. It’s packed with them! So let’s jump into it!
40-something Dr. Paulina Cuevas Strom is just minding her business as the great couples therapist she is when, one night, at a party, she’s propositioned by a sexy man with a wedding ring named Oliver. She almost has sex with him in the bathroom but thinks better of it.
Paulina (Pau), can’t stop thinking about Oliver though. It doesn’t help that her marriage with the weak and wimpy Anders contains a lot of boring sex. So one day, she texts Oliver back, meets him at a hotel, and they start banging.
Meanwhile, Pau is trying to help a fairly new patient, Mare, fit in better at work. Mare is tall and beautiful and looks like a model. But she’s also a bit crazy and controlling, which is what they’re working on.
Well, that work gets a bit tougher when Mare shows up to her session one day with her husband, Oliver. Pau tries not to freak out and, after that session, Oliver sneaks back in to apologize. He didn’t know. And then they have sex again.
Pau knows what she’s doing is bad but can’t quit this sexy guy! She can’t get away with it forever though (spoilers) and, one day, Mare comes into their session telling Pau she knows she’s sleeping with her husband. But it gets worse. It turns out, Mare orchestrated all this from the beginning. She’s been controlling her helpless husband, who does whatever she wants.
Pau knows to get the fuck out of the situation now. But it may be too late. The State Licensing Board gets a complaint about Pau’s practice and now she considers this all-out war. But war with Mare is not a war you want to be in. Pau may be way in over her head.
For some weird reason, Hollywood keeps forgetting that sex sells. I mean, that phrase (Sex Sells) was born in this town. So I don’t know why they go through these giant time chunks where they completely forget how thirsty people are. Especially women.
I know a female friend who STILL TALKS ABOUT the film, Unfaithful, to this day cause of the sex scenes. And if you’ve seen that movie, you know that they really don’t show that much. That’s the thing with this erotic-romance genre. It’s more about the lead-up to the sexual acts than the acts themselves.
This is exactly why Wuthering Heights is being hyped up. And “Fixation” wants to be the next movie in this very lucrative genre space.
The first thing I want to talk about when it comes to Fixation is AMPLIFYING CONFLICT.
You want conflict in every movie you write. But there are levels to conflict. And good writers look for ways to amplify conflict so it’s more powerful.
For example, if you’re covering infidelity, like this script is, you could write about a woman being unfaithful and that’s it. Which is, ironically, the plot to Unfaithful. But why not “plus it up?” You achieve this by amplifying conflict.
So, instead of just having a man and a woman cheating on their partners, why not make it so a therapist is unknowingly sleeping with the husband of one of her patients? Notice how that amplifies the conflict in two ways. She’s betraying the trust of someone paying her to be the most trustworthy person in their life. And she’s also risking her career.
Now, getting caught isn’t just about two people cheating. It’s about a lot more. Which means getting caught has bigger consequences, which is how you raise the stakes.
In order to make this sort of setup work, though, you have to solidify a couple of things. The bond between Pau and Mare has to be super close. Mare needs to trust her with her life. And Pau’s self-identity has to be built around how professional she is. These two requirements were not met. But they would’ve amplified the conflict even more had they been.
One of the reasons I love therapy-focused scripts is because they’re a cheat code for character development. Creating characters who are deep and who the reader feels like they know, is one of the harder things to do in screenwriting.
Therapy scripts allow you to do this easily. Cause you can ask characters very direct questions about what’s going on in their head. “Why do you feel like you need to control everything?” The answer to that question is going to tell us a lot about Mare. But if Mare was in a non-therapy screenplay, asking a question like that feels on-the-nose.
Another thing you might notice about this script is that there’s no goal. The main character isn’t trying to achieve some primary objective. So then you might ask, “Well, what’s the engine powering the story then?”
In a script like this, the engine is that we know the train is going to crash at some point and readers will always keep reading until the crash. It’s a classic story engine and it works very well. It works here too. I wanted to see what happened when this tightrope walk came tumbling down.
Another thing the script executes well is its midpoint. You have to make a decision with a script like this whether you’re going to take the train all the way to the third act or if you’re going to take it to the midpoint.
If you’re going to take it to the third act, it has to be a really compelling situation. And, to be honest, I think this script had enough juice to take its infidelity storyline to the third act. But they opted to come clean with the cheating at the midpoint. And this is usually what you want to do because it creates an amazing midpoint scene and it changes the nature of the story going forward so that the second half feels different from the first half.
So, here, Mare storms into Pau’s office, says she knows she’s sleeping with her husband and they fight it out. The scene takes some unexpected turns and becomes what will be the most talked about scene in the movie. So that’s good!
However, if you’re going to end your movie’s hook at the midpoint, you need to have a stellar plan for what’s going to happen in the second half of the movie. And this is where Fixation stumbles.
It’s not a catastrophic stumble. But here’s the problem. Everything up to the midpoint was authentic. You could imagine something like this happening in real life. After the midpoint, the writers fell victim to what I call “the movie-logic seduction.”
This is when a script quietly stops behaving like humans would… and starts behaving like a movie that knows it’s a movie. For example, Pau and Anders get away for a remote vacation (so Pau can escape the madness). And then, the next day, Mare and Oliver show up, saying they just happened to be in the neighborhood.
That’s not happening in real life.
And I’m not saying you can’t get away with this sometimes. But something about it feels sloppy, and most of your audience is going to feel that too. Worse, that kind of sloppiness is usually a warning sign. The Sloppy Monster almost never shows up alone. It brings friends. Which is exactly what happens here. By the end, the movie doesn’t even make sense.
Spoilers ahead. The two women are easily the worst people in the story. They are the ones doing all the terrible things. And yet Oliver and Anders are the ones who get punished, with Oliver turned into a handy scapegoat so everyone else can emotionally move on, consequences optional.
Despite that, the script was still good overall and a great example of exploiting marketing blind spots in Hollywood, which occasionally happen. Although I don’t know how you can forget that sex sells. I mean, duh.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: In addition to all the other great screenwriting tips in this script, another is dramatic irony. This is a great dramatic irony situation. Pau is doing marriage counseling therapy sessions with a couple while sleeping with the husband. Every word she utters in these sessions has dual meanings. That creates great subtext which, in turn, leads to compelling scenes.
