Today, Scriptshadow asks… Is there a script in the last five years that’s this good that falls apart this spectacularly?
Genre: Thriller
Premise: A couple and their adopted daughter have their cabin invaded by four strangers who take the family captive. But they’re not here to kill them. They’re here for something far worse.
About: This is a bestselling book that is now being made into a movie. The book was adapted by Steve Desmond and Michael Sherman, whose Back to the Future like script, “Harry’s All Night Hamburger’s,” finished top 10 on the 2018 Black List.
Writers: Steve Desmond and Michael Sherman (based on the novel by Paul Tremblay)
Details: 100 pages
This is going to be a controversial comments section. I implore you, once again, to read the script first and then read my review.
One look at the Amazon page for “Cabin” shows that it’s got 3 out of 5 stars on 790 ratings. That’s a low score for a book that has that many reads. Usually, if a book is popular enough to get that many purchases, it’s because people liked it and told other people about it, resulting in a higher score.
If you read the reviews, you get an idea of what the problem might be. Here’s a common response: “This is the first of his that I’ve read and although I liked his writing style and found the premise of the book fascinating, I (like many others) felt the tang of disappointment start to form about 2/3rds of the way through the book and then literally threw it on the floor after the final page. Had such great potential, but sadly fails to even remotely live up to itself.”
Yesterday we had a great script that solidified itself with a great ending.
Today we have a great script that destroys itself with a terrible ending.
In a way, a great script with a bad ending is worse than a bad script with a bad ending. Because at least with the bad script, you didn’t have any expectations. Conversely, being let down as badly as “Cabin” lets you down makes you want to “literally” throw the script “on the floor.”
So what’s all the fuss about?
7 year old Wen is outside a remote cabin catching grasshoppers when a giant of a man named Leonard blocks out the sun and introduces himself. Leonard appears to be a sweet man, befriending Wen and talking to her about her grasshopper catching adventures.
But there’s something underneath Leonard’s kindness, a kind of urgency that implies something bad is afoot. We see that badness in the form of his three approaching friends, a nurse, Sabrina, a short stocky cook named Adriane, and a redneck dude named Redmond. They all have homemade Mad Max like weapons with them.
Wen darts inside, telling her two dads, Andrew (liberal) and Eric (conservative) that there are bad people outside. The three of them try and fortify all entrances but Leonard kicks down the door. Once the invaders have cornered the family, they tell them they’re not here to hurt them.
You see, the four of them have been called here by a higher power shown to them through visions to get these three to sacrifice one member of their family. If they don’t do this by sundown, all 7 billion people on earth will die, leaving them to be the last three people on the planet.
Well, naturally, Eric and Andrew call b.s. Clearly you guys are all looney toons. But when the family refuses to kill someone, the invaders place Redmund down and beat him to death with their Mad Max weapons. Leonard then turns on the TV, where we see that a magnitude 9 quake just hit off the coast of Oregon. “This is just the beginning,” Leonard says. “The longer you wait, the more people die.”
Andrew calls the earthquake a coincidence but Eric is starting to waver. During the script, we occasionally flash back to the lives of each participant, both the family and the invaders, before this day happened. It helps provide some context for where each party is coming from. As sunset nears, Leonard does everything in his power to convince Eric and Andrew that this must be done. But they refuse to believe. Or at least Andrew does. Eric however………
This script FLEW.
One of the fastest reads of the year.
Right from the Ode to Frankenstein opening all the way til the death of the third invader, this thing moves like wildfire.
What I always tell you guys to do – no matter how much dead horse beating it involves – is to find a fresh angle on a familiar concept. Here, we have the very familiar setup of a home invasion. However, there’s a twist. The people invading the house cannot harm the family. The family can only harm itself.
At first glance, this doesn’t seem like that big of a change but the more you read and the more desperate the invaders become, you start to sympathize with their situation. What if you could only save yourself and everybody else on earth if you convinced someone to do the most horrible act a human can do? There’s a desperation to that situation because who’s going to willingly kill a family member just because you say the world’s going to end?
Another way that “Cabin” separates itself is the family involved. At first, I wasn’t on board with the choice of characters. Typically, in these types of scenarios, you’ll make the house owners entitled college kids. This means that you’re kind of rooting for the kids to kill each other. There’s definitely more of a “fun” vibe to the situation.
Whereas here, you have this progressive gay couple and this little girl… it definitely creates a more serious vibe. So I didn’t like that these were the people who were in this situation. It felt too intense.
But then I remembered one of the key tenets of good storytelling: Make things difficult. If we want the characters to die – like some Friday the 13th sequel – that’s not as gripping as if we want them to live.
With that said, I battled throughout the script with whether the execution was sophisticated enough to justify this choice. Had the ending worked, I’d say it was a win. But when the ending crashed and burned, it validated my fear. The writers didn’t have the weight to pull it off.
Despite that, the script is insanely readable.
I have to give it to these guys because they structured this well.
Normally, home invasions get boring in the second act because you’re artificially moving characters from room to room and recycling conversations to fill up pages. But, here, they add this repeating ticking time bomb of, if you don’t do the sacrifice, we have to kill one of our own. That means we’re always 12-15 pages away from another exciting situation. It isn’t just a way to keep your script entertaining. It’s a way to subconsciously create a structure in the reader’s head where they understand where the script is going and that they’ll be repeatedly rewarded for continuing to read.
This might sound like Carson psychobabble until you consider the opposite. Let’s say the bad guys don’t kill one of their own every couple of hours. Now you’ve got the same situation on page 90 as you had on page 10. Nothing is building. Nothing is getting worse. And most importantly, it’s hard to create new situations if everything stays exactly the same. There has to be consistent change in a script for it to remain interesting.
Let’s talk about that ending. Major spoilers ahead. You’ve been warned.
First off, the way one of the family members is killed is by accident. There’s a scuffle for a gun and Wen is accidentally shot and killed. There are a couple of things wrong with this. One, the audience doesn’t want a 7 year old girl to die in a movie that’s supernatural entertainment. They’d accept it if this was “Manchester by the Sea 2: Double Depression.” But this is entertainment here. So it feels off.
But also, it destroys the whole point of the movie – which is the choice. The invaders point out that Wen’s death wasn’t a chosen kill. Which means that Andrew or Eric still have to kill one or the other. But if you lose your 7 year old girl, that choice becomes a lot easier. Most parents, especially right after their kid died, would have no problem dying themselves because they can’t live without their child.
So as Eric and Andrew resist wanting to die, it doesn’t ring true. In fact, you wouldn’t even know they lost their daughter five pages ago.
But that’s not the worst part of the ending. The worst part is that Eric and Andrew hug each other, babble some nonsense about how love conquers all, then drive off into the sunset together, and we never find out what happens.
It was borderline infuriating. Look, I get that some writers like to leave the ending up to the reader. But the engine that drove this script was, is this thing real or isn’t it? And to not answer that question feels like a big F U.
Despite all this, I have to give the script a ‘worth the read’ because I absolutely loved everything up until Wen’s death. And that’s gotta be worth something, right? But I have a feeling this script is going to make a lot of people really angry.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: In these types of movies, who you choose as the victims will determine the tone of the film. If you choose victims that the audience wants to see die (Friday the 13th), it will play as entertainment. If you choose victims that the audience wants to see live (Straw Dogs), it will play serious. Make sure you know which of these movies you’re writing and don’t mix them up!
