Genre: Drama
Premise: (from Black List) Haunted by the death of his hoarder mother, an antisocial man suffering from obsessive compulsions takes work as a trauma cleaner in hopes of facing his past, but the job soon begins to infest and unravel his mental state.
About: This script made the Black List and was selected for the Blumhouse and K Period Media Screamwriting Fellowship. Screenwriter Geo Bradley describes it as, “REPULSION by way of CRONENBERG.”
Writer: Geo Bradley
Details: 109 pages
Matt Smith would be perfect for this role.
Rot feels like a script that was written in 2004, right at the end of the indie era. It’s part Sunshine Cleaners, part Lars and the Real Girl, part, well, Cronenberg.
The script conveys a simple easy-to-follow narrative. Along with its low character count and one-to-two-line paragraphs, you can fly through it in under an hour.
But it tackles that age old script trope of, “Is this reality or is the main character going insane?” I think that when writers make this choice, they think there are maybe… 5-10 other scripts like that bouncing around Hollywood.
I got news for you. There are a lot more than that. We’re talking hundreds. Maybe even thousands. It’s easily one of the most common tropes I run up against when reading scripts.
So you’re kind of undercutting the very thing you’re trying to do. You’re trying to write a non-Hollywood script – something with some actual originality to it. But these scripts aren’t original.
Doesn’t mean they can’t be good. But it’s tough. The best version of this screenplay I’ve read in the last five years was Magazine Dreams. Probably because it never crept too far into the “dream” component. It was more about the character. That’s the best avenue to go down with these scripts. Write the most compelling character ever. And surround him with the best story you can! That’s something writers of these stories always forget. They get so focused on the character and the dream sequences that they forget to add the kind of story that makes people want to turn the page.
29 year old Marshall, a construction worker who hates his job, is a huge loner. The guy had a weird childhood where his widowed mother was a hoarder. The kids at school eventually found out about his house and, from then on, it was game over for him. He was a freak.
At 29, not much has changed. Marshall barely talks to his co-workers and pines after one of the workers at the nearby sandwich shop, Liv. One day, Marshall nearly takes someone’s hand off with a staple gun and is fired.
Luckily, the superintendent at his building, Keith, needs someone for his very specialized job – cleanup after someone dies in their home. As it turns out, a lot of these people who die alone aren’t the cleanest, so going to their places reminds Marshall of his mother’s house. And yet, there’s something cathartic about it. Like he’s cleaning up his mom’s house each time.
After learning that Liv has a secret – she has an Onlyfans site – Marshall grows some balls and asks her out. Liv is thrilled and the two immediately enter into a sexual relationship, terminating Mashall’s v-card. Liv is way more sexually experienced and settles into a sort of dominant-submissive relationship with Marshall, which he loves.
Meanwhile, Marshall continues to do more clean-up jobs, until, unexpectedly, a lonely female neighbor of his dies in an accident. Cleaning out her place has an intense effect on Marshall, who starts thinking of the woman as his mom, and that cause him to begin losing his mind. When Liv dumps him, Marshall falls even further. And if something doesn’t change quickly, he will completely self-destruct.
As I said above: Nobody ever adds a storyline to these scripts.
What’s the story engine here?
What’s pushing us to turn the pages?
The only real thing is the “will they or won’t they” storyline with Marshall and Liv.
Sometimes that can be enough. But the characters have to be 10 out of 10 to pull that off all by themselves. Otherwise, you need a story.
And there were stories to be had here.
Why not have one of the early cleanups lead to some suspicion on Marshall’s part that the person didn’t die, but rather was killed. Now you have a mystery. A goal – solve this murder. He could still do other jobs, if that’s what the author liked best about their idea. But you also now have this story engine of the murder.
You could’ve even applied it to the neighbor. Marshall could’ve seen someone sketchy go into her apartment days before she died. The script would have had so much more juice had it gone down that route.
You always know these scripts don’t have a story because the writer never knows what to do with their ending.
Let me lay it out for everyone. When your character has a goal, the ending is mapped out for you. They either achieve the goal (successfully blow up the first atomic bomb) or not (they fail). Without a goal, your ending will always feel like some variation of tentative and uncertain.
Which is exactly what we get here. Marshall is wandering around, confused, unsure where to take his life next. We do get some finality with Marshall’s arc as a character. But would I say it’s as satisfying as it would’ve been had there also been a plot directive? No.
With that said, there is a unique voice at the heart of the script. If you like heavy darkness, this script might be for you. It got too depressing for moi at times: People dying alone on chairs watching The History Channel. Murder-suicides with pregnant women. Lots of detailed sequences involving bodily fluids and insects. The sex stuff is kind of sad. But I know this is perfect for some of you sickos.
My rating here is not for the writing itself, which I thought was good. It was for the execution. For my personal taste, I thought this was the wrong creative direction to go in.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: If you’re going to write dark subject matter, this script is how you do it. The writing here is extremely sparse. Remember that drama is the slowest of the genres. So, if you write a drama with big long thick paragraphs, you are adding slow on top of slow. By adding fast on top of slow, Bradley neutralized the problem. Even though this script wasn’t my cup of tea, I appreciated the writer for making it such an effortless read.
