Genre: Drama/Thriller
Premise: A young woman obsessed with eating healthy becomes convinced that all the food she puts in her body is rotting, leading to her having a meltdown at her sister’s wedding.
About: This script finished NUMBER 1 on the recently released 2022 Black List.
Writer: Catherine Schetina
Details: 94 pages
One of the more popular topics for a Black List script is the main character having an unhealthy obsession with something. A ton of these scripts make the Black List so it’s a topic worth considering if your goal is to make the list. In the past we’ve seen obsession over exercise, bodybuilding, porn, influencers.
It’s the car crash principle. We know the crash is coming. And we can’t help but keep looking. We want to see what happens when our hero’s crash finally comes.
30 year old Hannah Abrams works a retail job and bemoans the fact that she doesn’t have her life together. She’s in a relationship with her girlfriend, Cal, who’s a local school teacher.
The two have a great relationship except for one problem. Hannah has orthorexia, a condition where healthy eating becomes an obsession.
Hannah isn’t thrilled that she has to head up to Northern California to her perfect lawyer sister’s wedding but Cal going with her makes it a little easier. On the way up, the two stop to get food and Hannah buys a salad. She then flips out when one of the pieces of lettuce has mold on it.
Hannah tells Cal that the only way to deal with this poison going inside her body is to go on a cleanse. “During your sister’s wedding?” Cal asks. Yup, Hannah says. You see, to Hannah, all her little weird food solutions make total sense, even if no one else understands them.
Once at the weekend cabin, Hannah struggles mightily to survive during group meals. Everyone slurps up chemically-injected food sources. To Hannah’s horror, even her own girlfriend chows down on steroid-injected beef like it’s no big deal.
On that first day, Hannah is horrified to find that there are maggot eggs underneath her fingernails, no doubt from that rotten salad! So she tears away at her fingernails. But she doesn’t get rid of it all because, the next day, she finds maggots on her hands. And also underneath her skin!
Hannah goes into major damage control, scratching and clawing into her skin to capture the little buggers and pluck them out. She also stops eating, causing her to look more and more like a walking corpse. Things get so bad that clumps of her hair keep falling out.
Hannah repeatedly refuses Cal’s help and Cal begins to go through her own mental anguish as she comes to terms with the fact that she’s been enabling this behavior for their entire relationship. It’ll be up to Cal to step to the plate and get Hannah to the hospital before it’s too late. But that’s the problem. IT IS TOO LATE.
I like creepy obsession stories. If you look back through all my reviews of them, I usually give them high marks. I think it’s because we all feel like we’re close to being one of these people. We all have our unique obsessions. What would it take for them to become a legit medical condition? The line between the two is probably a lot smaller than we know.
But the fact that we aren’t yet as wacko as these jokers allows to watch them spiral out of control from a place of comfy schadenfreude. I think that’s another reason these concepts work. We can read them and think, “Well at least I’m not THAT level of crazy!”
I also personally know people who are obsessed with the super-clean food industry and they’re their own level of wacky. For instance, I knew a guy once who bought off-brand milk from Australia because Australia doesn’t pasteurize their milk, or something, and so the milk is the only legit chemical-free milk in the world (his words, not mine). It cost him, I believe, 30 bucks a gallon.
It seems to be this hole you go down that never ends. Cause first it’s Whole Foods since they’re organic. But then you find out that they’re only “certified” organic, which still allows for some light chemicals to be used. So now you start going to Erewhon, which has the truly truly truly organic food. Of course, all the food there cost five times as much. And that’s another element to this obsession. You’re soon paying 100 bucks a day for your habit.
As for the actual story, I give it mixed marks. The stuff that Hannah goes through – first the eggs in her fingernails, and then the maggots, and then the fly eggs, and then the flies coming out of her. I’ve seen that before. I read quite a few scripts where insects are crawling around underneath the character’s skin and they’re trying to scratch them out.
So nothing there really surprised me.
But I did think it was clever to build this narrative around a wedding. A lot of times with these weird indie scripts, the writer focuses so much on the bizarre stuff (like insects breeding inside you) that they overlook a solid defined narrative.
By constructing a script that happens over a single weekend, you take care of that issue. We now have form to our story. We know where the high-pressure points are (Hannah has to give a maid of honor speech). And, most importantly, we know where it’s going to end. It’s going to end in two days. Which means we know we’re not going to be lingering on endlessly.
It’s sort of like Meet the Parents, the I’mFlippingTheFu*kOut edition.
I also liked the relationship aspect of the story. We’ve seen scripts such as Magazine Dreams and movies like Joker that tackle these weirdo characters dealing with their obsessions in isolation. It becomes a different story when the protagonist is in a relationship. Because everything they do affects the other person. And you also have this other character who has to decide – do they stand up to their significant other’s delusions? Or do they nod their head when their partner says, ‘I’m fine,’ even when it’s clear they’re not?
Finally, this script made me think. There’s this moment where Hannah is listening to the radio and there’s a segment about how much micro-plastics we ingest every time we drink bottled water and we have no idea what the long term effects of these micro-plastics are. I drink a lot of bottled water. And now I’m thinking, “Maybe I shouldn’t do that.”
Which I think is healthy. But if I start advocating to rip my skin off to take out the maggots crawling underneath my skin, you have permission to tell me I’ve gone too far.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: “Hannah smiles at her brother. Genuine love there.” You should never ever have to write the second sentence of this line. If you can convincingly SHOW that Hannah and her brother love each other through the actions they take or the words they say, why would you need to directly tell the writer that there’s “genuine love there?” Shouldn’t we already know? In the past, I’ve told writers this is okay, but I realize now that you’re just allowing the writer to be lazy. Do the hard work. Find a couple of moments that unequivocally show that there’s genuine love between Hannah and her brother. And then you never have to tell us in the action description.
