Genre: Thriller
Premise: On a private island off San Francisco, a nanny goes to work for a mother who is one of America’s most powerful tech entrepreneurs. Things slowly begin to devolve as the mother’s hyper-monitoring and surveillance become suffocating.
About: Another script that made last year’s Black List. Laura Kosann has won the Nicholl Screenwriting Contest. She wrote an interesting script I reviewed last year called, “From Little Acorns Grow.” Definitely a writer to keep your eyes on.
Writer: Laura Kosann
Details: 113 pages
Anna Kendrick for…. ANNA!
Give me an island and I’m a happy script reader.
I don’t know what it is about islands but the second I see one in a logline, my eyes light up. It’s probably because of the isolation – the fact that you can’t run away. Especially these days, with everything being so interconnected – with help being a pushed button away – islands are the last places in the world where you’re truly screwed if things go wrong.
I also love islands near giant cities. I’ve told myself for years I’m going to visit Catalina Island (a ferry ride away from Los Angeles – the island doesn’t allow cars, how cool is that!) and I still can’t get over the fact that there’s an island (called “Treasure Island”!!!) in the San Francisco Bay, just sitting there, that you or anyone can live on. Which segues perfectly into today’s script, because that’s where our island is located – in San Francisco. Except it’s not a public island. It’s private.
Ever hear of Elizabeth Holmes? The creepiest tech CEO in history? Well, wait until you meet Nicole. We’ll get to her in a moment. First we must meet Anna, a 30-something former tech engineer who left her job abruptly under mysterious circumstances. Now, she just focuses on nannying.
Anna gets a call for a prestigious nannying job that will require her to live in the mother’s house. When she shows up to meet the mommy she’ll be working for, she instead is greeted by a boat! A drone boat which tells her to hop on. Anna reluctantly does and gets shuttled across the bay to a glitzy home on a private island.
Here she meets Nicole, a care-free tech CEO with more money than South America. Nicole is in her 40s and has set her sights on using technology to eliminate miscarriages. She had a bunch of miscarriages of her own due to the stress of her job and wants to make it so that women can work in stressful environments and still have babies.
Aiden is her miracle baby, her only child, now just months old. And she needs Anna to take care of her while she works from home.
Aiden’s got some problems. His skin blisters in the sun, so he always has to be kept under a special netting when he’s outside. He spits up and chokes wildly, so you have to be very careful about what you feed him and how you feed it to him. Basically, he’s the most delicate baby ever. Which means Anna rarely gets an opportunity to nanny him. Nicole is always over her shoulder telling her what she can and cannot do.
It isn’t long before Anna senses something is off with Aiden. And it takes even less time for her to deduce that Nicole is bats—t crazy. There’s a great scene early in the script where, out of nowhere, Nicole goes into this seizure-like crazed fit that’s utterly unsettling. Just when it seems like she’s dead, she smiles and is fine again. She explains that she just wanted Anna to know how Aiden’s choking episodes looked like so she could recognize them. But that isn’t even her biggest “crazy” tell. She swims in her private pool with Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” blasting on max volume!
Anna senses that if she doesn’t get Aiden away from this witch, he will most likely die. But, you see, Anna doesn’t have the best judgement skills either. She’s got a couple of wackadoodle episodes in her own past linked back to a traumatic event in her life. So she wonders: Is this woman really endangering her baby or I am just going nuts?
I have to say, I LOOVVVEED the first half of this script.
It was everything I wanted my contained thriller on an island screenplay to be. It was very much a female version of Ex Machina. I’m sure that was a big inspiration for Kossan.
Nicole is a particularly fun character. She takes the “Oscar Isaac” role and ups it several notches. Her helicopter child-parenting and helicopter nanny-parenting is so fun to watch. You’re wondering what weirdo thing is she going to do next? And watching Anna slowly realize that she’s surrounded by cameras no matter what she does really makes the suffocation feel unbearable.
I would give the first half of this screenplay an A.
Here’s the problem though (and we’re going to get into semi-spoilers so you’ve been warned). There’s clearly something sketchy going on with Aiden, the baby, to the point where we know the writer is hiding something.
What do I mean by that?
If you are going out of your way to keep details away from the reader, we’ll eventually figure out that you’re cheating. We never see Aiden for more than a brief few seconds. He’s always under netting. Or when Anna takes care of him, we never really get a good look at Aiden. He always seems to be conveniently distorted. And because we don’t get any extended looks or interactions with him, we know something is up. So when the big twist comes, we already kinda figured something like that was the case.
Big twists are tough. I’m not going to pretend they aren’t. If you give too much information, we figure it out. If you give too little information, the twist feels random. Honestly, the only way to get twists right is from repeated feedback. You have to test the twist. Get feedback. Rewrite it with adjustments. Then test it on ANOTHER PERSON. Cause the last reader already knows the twist is coming so their feedback is worthless. Then you just keep making adjustments until it’s perfect.
This probably needs 4 or 5 more drafts to make this work. You need to give us more time with Aiden where Aiden is acting normal so we don’t suspect anything. And then you can’t highlight so many times where something is weird about Aiden. Because we can put two and two together. We know this is a tech CEO. She’s talking about making artificial wombs a lot. Artificial sperm. We suss out what’s going on here long before the twist arrives.
Which is too bad for this draft because the script started off sooooo good. It was easily in “impressive” territory. I just think there were too many questionable decisions in the second half. I didn’t think it was worth it to have Anna questioning her sanity. Every writer does this. And it’s never done well. Someone questioning their sanity always feels sloppy.
You had enough going for you with your original concept: A tech CEO invites a nanny onto her private island to take care of her baby then starts acting crazy enough that the nanny wants to rescue the baby. That’s a movie there. The “Am I also insane” question overcomplicates it.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: When you choose to reveal information is so important to every story you write. It can completely change how the story reads. For example, Anna goes to meet Nicole on this beach where she assumes her house is. But instead, there’s a boat and it’s talking to her, telling her to get on. Kossan could’ve easily told Anna and us beforehand that Anna was going to an island. But then you don’t get the fun reveal of both her and us being surprised by this boat. Ironically, I think that Kossan makes some questionable decisions about when to reveal information later on in the story. But in this boat reveal, she hit the bullseye. That’s information that leads to a way better story moment if you wait to reveal it. It’s a wasted opportunity if you tell us about the island beforehand.
