Genre: Drama
Premise: A young woman attends the funeral of her college boyfriend’s father, ten years after they broke up.
About: This script finished in the middle of the pack on last year’s Black List.
Writer: Gaelyn Golde
Details: 100 pages
The Feels.
We’ve all got them.
Well, most of us anyway.
And we use screenplays as vessels to convey those feels so we can give other people the feels too!
One could argue that the entire point of this maddening process called screenwriting is to deliver feels. The writers who can make people feel the most are the most successful.
But why is making people feel something so hard? We’re all living this same tough, hard-nosed life together. We’re all experiencing the same things. Just share what we’re going through and, naturally, other people will relate.
Except it isn’t that easy.
In fact, it’s really, really hard. There are a lot of ingredients that go into giving people the feels. There’s realism. There’s creating characters we care about. There’s regulating an emotional experience that maximizes a person’s likelihood of feeling sadness. There’s creating a compelling enough story that the reader stays invested enough that their “feels” nerve endings remain activated.
Today’s script hits the feels head on. A box of Kleenex was sent out to every producer who read it. Metaphorically, of course.
Let’s find out if we’ll all be blubbering crybabies by the end.
—
Saturn Return follows 29-year-olds Anders and Eve, along with their good friend Lincoln. The story is set in Indiana, where Eve and Lincoln drive in to attend Anders’ father’s funeral. The group, who met and became best friends in college, hasn’t seen each other in a long time. So there’s a lot of emotion hovering just beneath the surface of their reunion.
Just as the funeral is about to start, we cut back ten years to when the three first met at college. Eve is a nerd who doesn’t want to talk to anybody and only wants to study. Anders is, conversely, determined to network the hell out of the school so he can fulfill his dreams of becoming insanely rich. And Lincoln is a cool jock who carpe diems every day.
It isn’t long before the three become friends, and we’re jumping forward again to the present, where awkwardness reigns. There’s clearly a lot of tension between Anders and Eve. Although it’s never explicitly said, we get the feeling these two were once together and something happened to tear them apart.
And that’s pretty much the entire story. We keep jumping back and forth between past and present, getting little breadcrumbs tossed at us regarding Anders and Eve’s past. It turns out they did date. They did fall in love. But when the real world came knocking, they each got jobs on different sides of the country and had to split up. This funeral may just be an opportunity for them to revisit whether that was the best decision.
—
I’m going to make a big assumption here: this was based on a real experience for the writer, Gaelyn Golde. When it comes to writing stories about the feels, that’s a good starting point. You want to mine as much real-life emotion as you can.
But using real-life stories to inspire your screenplays can be dangerous. Here’s why: when you’re too close to the source material, you lose objectivity about what actually serves the story. A screenplay is about distilling everything down to what’s necessary and cutting everything else. When you write about real life, you tend to think everything is necessary because your subjective point of view tells you that if it happened to you, it matters. But “happened to me” doesn’t automatically equal “essential to the story.”
Take the character of Lincoln. Poor old Lincoln has nothing going on in this story. He has no bearing on the plot whatsoever. It’s not like him and Eve ever got together.
I’m guessing that in Golde’s real-life experience of going to this funeral, “her version” of Lincoln was part of that experience and, therefore, she felt he had to be in the screenplay too. But he didn’t. So he probably should’ve been excised. Or, if you just like the idea of having three characters instead of two—since it creates a more varied dynamic—that’s fine. But then you have to reimagine the real-world character so that he’s more intricately involved in the plot.
Okay, back to my original question.
Did the script give us the feels?
It certainly tries to. But the story is so on-the-nose (it delivers this very literal, grounded story about funerals and former relationships) that it almost doesn’t feel like a movie.
Contrast this with a similar story I reviewed last year, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, which also covered a trio of friends: one girl and two guys. That story felt more cinematic. It followed a group of friends who started a video game company, and we watched them grow together and become rich and famous and then deal with the fallout after the fame. It just felt bigger and less obvious.
So that’s what I struggled with here. Saturn Return was too on the nose. I guess you could argue that rawness, that realness, should make the feels even more intense. But it didn’t for me. It felt like the writer was trying too hard to make us cry and not hard enough to tell us a good story. Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow was a big, grand, sweeping story that definitely made you feel something.
I will say this, though: time-cutting in a love story is very effective at creating emotion. We do this all the time as humans. We time-travel in our heads back to moments in the past, thinking, “What if this had been different? What if that had gone differently?”
Scripts like this are the visual representation of that. And it was probably the best thing about the script.
But the problem with Saturn Return – which phonetically doesn’t sound right, by the way – is that it leans so heavily into death that I became too aware of its manipulative tendencies.
There’s a scene in this script where Anders, whose dad has just died in the present, is with Eve in the past when she’s talking to his dad, who at that time was alive. Anders’ dad asks Eve what her dad, who died when she was young, was like. Eve tells him her complex feelings about her dead father, and Anders’ dad says not to worry and brings up when his father had died when he was young.
And it was just like… come on, man. Too much.
Look, I get what you’re going for. You want us swimming in an ocean of our tears. But here’s the thing: overloading people with any one emotion, especially grief, is not the path to feels. You have to create constant contrast between happiness and sadness, taking the reader on a roller coaster. Because it’s the roller coaster effect that creates the crying. You bring them up, and then, when they least expect it, you pull them down.
There’s a little of that here. The characters joke around with each other some. But it’s not enough.
What I will say is that Golde achieves what she set out to achieve. This is not some poorly constructed script, like a lot of the scripts that plague the Black List. But because it’s so on-the-nose with its treatment of its concept, and because it hits us with death again and again and again, it shows its hand too clearly and we never fall under its spell.
Decent but not quite recommend-worthy.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I Learned: All story engines are not created equal. You could even say that every engine has a number beside it representing how powerful a force it is in pushing the story forward. 1 being the lowest and 10 being the highest. Killing Thanos? That’s a “10” on the story engine scale. Finding out what happened to Eve and Anders’ relationship? I’d give that maybe a “3.”
Now, that number could’ve been higher had the writer spent more time hyping up what had happened. If, for example, you kept telling us that something big and terrible had occurred—but we have to wait to find out what—now you’re bringing that story engine up to a “6,” maybe even a “7.” The lesson? Don’t just rely on the inherent drama of your concept. Amplify it. Make us desperate to know the answer. That’s how you turn a weak engine into a powerful one.
