Spec sale alert!
Genre: Thriller
Premise: A young teacher gets kidnapped and tossed into a car trunk but when the car finally stops and she gets out, there is nobody around. This begins a year long investigation into what happened to her.
About: This script was part of a heated bidding war won by Searchlight. The writer, William Gillies, has another recent film on his resume: Hollow Road, about parents trying to help their daughter after she hits someone with her car.
Writer: William Gillies
Details: 118 pages
Nicola Peltz for Val?
I have a lot of confidence in this one. For starters, it’s my kind of concept. I like these character-driven mysteries. It also had 11 production houses bidding on it before selling to Fox Searchlight. And it’s repped by Kaplan Perrone, who has some of the highest standards in the business. I know because whenever I send Aaron one of the scripts I find here, he’s tough!
Val is a school teacher who wakes up in the trunk of a moving car one day. Naturally, she’s terrified. And when the car finally stops, she braces for the worst. But when all she hears is silence, she eventually opens the trunk herself, only to find herself in a Boise, Idaho field. And THERE’S NO ONE IN THE CAR. She was simply… left here.
Val hurries to the nearest road, finds help, gets home, and temporarily moves back in with her Christian Fundamentalist mother. The local cops, lead by female detective, Delgado, can’t find any evidence that this kidnapping actually happened. Frustrated, Val goes back to her life, only to wake up with a man in her room two months later, who drugs her and puts her in the same trunk again. Except this time when she wakes up (again with no one in the car), it’s in a forest in Montana!
Val heads back home and, after talking to Delgado and her partner, decides to go into witness protection and heads to the West Coast. Val starts a life there, however, three months later… she gets kindnapped again! And this time she’s left out in the desert! Hey, at least each kindnapping has a little theme to it!
Val is done playing the victim and moves back home, determined to figure out who’s doing this. Her prime suspect is Elliot Luthe, the twin brother of an old friend of Val’s, who later committed suicide, which Luthe blamed her for. Val thinks he’s on some sort of revenge trip and is fucking with her.
But Delgado isn’t so sure, and starts looking into some traveling salesman dude and his partner. The two were in Boise and Montana at the same times Val was dumped in those states. Val finally gets sick of the nonsense and kidnaps Luthe! She takes him into the middle of nowhere, just like he did to her, and demands answers. Except Luthe swears he doesn’t know what she’s talking about. What happens next puts Val in a position she won’t be able to come back from. So let’s hope she got rid of the right guy.
Noooooooooo!
Why do you destroy my dreams Script Gods!!??
I thought we had a good one here.
I’ll say this about Incidents: It’s different.
And I’m guessing that’s what got it attention.
But this script is very wonky and weird. It starts. It stops. It starts again. It stops again. It builds up its mystery every time it resets, which is a lot. But around the midpoint of the script, I started to get the feeling that the writer didn’t know where he was headed. I didn’t feel like he knew who was doing this. And the ending confirmed that. We get a muddy explanation with no real closure.
Here’s the thing about ambiguous endings. They can work. Even though I don’t like them, I admit there are times where they can work. But this is not one of those times. And it’s explicitly because the mystery at the center of the story is so unique. When you hook us with such a strange mystery, we’re going to want a legit explanation. You absolutely must give us an answer.
Especially with a script THIS LONG that has SO MANY TIME JUMPS. That’s a bigger investment than normal (you’re asking us to start investing in a brand new story every time she moves after a kindnapping). And when the reader really invests, they want a payoff worthy of that investment.
But there’s a bigger issue here and it’s something I haven’t seen for a while. But it used to be quite common in scripts I read. Which is that you can feel the writer trying to figure out the mystery while they’re writing. They’re just as clueless about who did it as you. And that creates a narrative that feels like it’s on roller skates. There’s never a moment where the direction feels solid, like the writer has a plan.
This script also taught me that suspense, as a writing tool, has its limits. I was 100% engaged initially. The use of suspense after that first kidnapping was excellent. Because the circumstances behind the kidnapping were so strange. And we knew that the guy was still out there. That’s what created the suspense. So I’m reading to both figure out the answer to this mystery but also because I know it’s only a matter of time before they come for Val again.
But once we hit the second kidnapping, some sort of “interest switch” turned off. In mysteries, you want your story to evolve. If it doesn’t evolve, then we feel like we’re reading the same beats over and over again. Taking us to a forest as opposed to a field just wasn’t different enough. And now, the suspense that was working so well after the first kindnapping, had its power cut in half. Because not only is the kindnapping identical but now we’re emphasizing that Val isn’t in danger. She’s just being messed with.
And, finally, there’s so much waiting in this script. Val’s endlessly waiting around for the next kidnapping to happen. You guys know how I feel about “waiting around” narratives. They’re the opposite of what movies do well. Movies kick ass when the hero is active and going after things. Val eventually does that. But it takes forever. More than half this movie is Val waiting.
I’m trying to figure out why this got so much attention. I suppose that having such a unique take on the “kidnapping-murder” genre was enough to get studios excited. But I’m surprised they read the whole thing and felt like it was worthy of a big sale. I will say this. It has a very similar vibe to Prisoners, which was also a big spec sale. So, if you liked that script, you may enjoy this one. Especially because both scripts have underwhelming climaxes.
We’re deep in the screenwriting darkness, guys. I have to find a good script soon or I’ll go insane!
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: If you can come up with a twist on a missing woman story, that’s the equivalent of finding a goldmine in Hollywood. And even though the execution proved problematic here, this was a legitimately unique take on the girl-kidnapped subgenre.
