Things get crazy with the #2 script on the 2024 Black List!
Genre: Drama/Thriller
Premise: When taking her daughter to a playdate at a new friend’s house, Alice suddenly comes face to face with her childhood bully, Katrine. An evening of seemingly polite dinner conversation and catching up turns into a night of psychological warfare as the two women reveal the scars of their past while their two young daughters play.
About: This was the #2 script on last year’s Black List. I just reviewed the #1 script last week, if you’re interested. Marie Østerbye is a Danish screenwriter with a ton of TV experience in that industry.
Writer: Marie Østerbye
Details: 97 pages
A lot of times what happens is that a writer writes a killer first two acts then lays an egg with their third act.
This happens for a number of reasons but the main one is that the writer is too “in the moment” while writing those first two acts. They aren’t thinking about how all of this stuff is going to come together in the end. Which is why we here at Scriptsahdow Inc. encourage you to outline. The best way to prep for that third act is to outline because then you’ll be writing those first two acts with a purpose.
Today’s script, however, has the opposite problem. Marie writes an amazing third act. But forgets to give the first two acts the same amount of attention.
That’s what we’re going to discuss today. So let’s get rolling!
50 year old Alice got started late in life. She’s got an 8 year old daughter, Sofie, who she moves back to her old hometown with. This is causing a lot of consternation in the small apartment the two live in since Sofie misses all her old friends.
Luckily for Sofie, another girl at school, Ida, takes a liking to her and asks her to come over for a playdate. Alice is thrilled that her daughter is making friends, espeically because she’s concerned about her daughter’s chubbiness (something she dealt with as a child, too). She knows it’s harder to make friends if you don’t look thin and pretty.
When Alice takes Sofie to the big expensive house she’ll be spending the night at, she’s shocked when Katrine opens the door. Katrine is tall and thin and pretty. She was also Alice’s bully back when they were in third grade.
Katrine doesn’t seem to recognize Alice, invites her in, and Alice must decide what to do. Does she leave? Does she take her daughter and leave? Does she confront Katrine about that fateful year when Katrine made her life miserable?
Before Alice can decide, Katrine invites her in for a drink, and then later, dinner. As the alchohol starts flowing, Alice stops pretending, and confronts Katrine on what she did to her back then, which amounted to forcing her to eat an entire cake in front of all the other kids at lunchtime as a way to emphasize how fat she was.
Katrine plays ignorant at first but, eventually fesses up to remembering. She argues, however, that it wasn’t nearly as bad as Alice remembers, which triggers Alice even more. Alice becomes more aggressive, demanding the apology she never got. But Katrine won’t give it to her, forcing Alice to go to the most extreme measure of all.
Do you love dessert?
What if I told you that you could go to a restaurant where the main course was going to be terrible but the dessert was amazing?
Oh, and you weren’t able to skip the main course. You would have to sit through it, even if you didn’t eat it, before you could order the dessert?
Would you still do it?
That’s today’s script. In more ways than one.
Cause the whole story is built around cake, strangely enough. And I was struggling with it. I would go so far as to say, for 70% of this script, I was convinced the Black List voters were brain dead. That some virus had infected their bodies, preventing them from being able to identify good writing.
There was one moment in particular where, if I had been reading a hard copy of the script, as opposed to a PDF document on my laptop, I would’ve hurled it across the room.
That moment occurs near the halfway point, when Alice and Katrine are going through their old elementary school yearbook (they had those??) and Katrine leans in and kisses Alice.
When I see moments like this, I smell desperation. Writers tend to only break out shocking moments when the script isn’t working. I’ve been guilty of this myself. You can tell your script isn’t firing on all cylinders. You’re not sure why. So, you think, maybe if I make something shocking happen, it will fix it.
It never fixes it. It only ends up confusing the reader. There is nothing in the story or characters that have been set up whereby Katrine trying to kiss Alice is authentically motivated. It’s all writer-created.
So, I pushed on, begrudgingly, trying to get to page 97 as quickly as I could so I could call it a day.
But then the writer finally started writing.
What do I mean by this?
One of the ways to make your script stand out is to do things that you’re not supposed to do. You move off of the main road and implore the readers to follow you. Once the writer started to use the children as pawns and placed them in serious danger, I understood why the script made the Black List.
Cause that’s a risky thing to do. And to be a good writer, you must take risks. Here you have your protagonist, someone we’re supposed to be rooting for, and she’s holding Katrine’s child’s life in her hands and using it to force Katrine to confess.
It’s done in a very clever way. If Alice had held a gun to Ida’s head, that’d be too much. Ida injured herself on her own. Alice is a nurse. She has the ability to save her or the ability to let her succumb to her wounds. It’s an off-the-nose way to threaten Katrine.
What I thought was going to happen was that we get this “chaotic” ending that wasn’t really chaotic. It’s only chaotic in the “writing” sense, whereby you could argue it was chaotic in a book club meeting. For these stories to work, you have to go beyond that. You have to make them genuinely chaotic, which likely means going further than you’re comfortable going as a writer.
That’s an important detail right there. We all have our pre-established boundaries that we won’t cross as writers. Maybe we don’t want to be too silly, or too violent, or too serious, or too quirky, or too structured, or too weird, or too emotional, or too wild. But how do you grow if you’re never pushing beyond those boundaries into uncomfortable places? Nobody’s ever grown by standing in the same place.
I’m just having a hard time reconciling reading through 70 pages of YUCK to get to 30 pages of WOW. Is that a ‘worth the read’ if I’m sending you guys to the sarlacc pit for the first three-quarters of this script?
I guess I’ll say it is. But this is another example of the Black List 3.0, where the list is more about scripts with potential than scripts that are finished products. And this script does have potential. It just needs some sprucing up in those first two acts.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: If there’s a lesson to this script, it’s that, if you have a great third act, that does not give you permission to “bide time” throughout your first two acts. If you don’t know whether you’re biding time or not, pay attention to how many scenes are setting up that third act as opposed to being entertaining in their own right. There are too many scenes here setting up the relationship between Katrine and Alice, as well as what happened in their past. We get it by the halfway point. You don’t need to tell us seven different ways to Sunday that Katrine was mean to Alice in elementary school. Trust me. We got it after the first eight times. Check out Speak No Evil for how to do this correctly. There’s a scene near the midpoint, for example, where our evil couple takes our ‘good’ couple out to dinner and it becomes very uncomfortable due to how the evil couple acts. That’s how to entertain readers before your big third act.
