Genre: Thriller/Contained Horror/Drama
Premise: When renowned interventionist Warren Man’s daughter, Christy, suffers a relapse and her family is forced to deal with their inner demons at the site of a tragedy that tore them apart, it slowly becomes clear that this is no ordinary relapse, but something much more sinister.
About: This script made this year’s Black List, an annual list of the best screenplays of the year, with 7 votes. I normally wouldn’t review a script this low on the list so early. But I saw a few of you talking about it in the comments section and was intrigued. The script is being produced by Hopscotch Pictures. This appears to be the writer’s breakthrough screenplay.
Writer: Colin Bannon
Details: 91 pages
I used to watch Intervention, aka one of the most frustrating shows ever produced. You’d meet someone who was addicted to drugs, watch their horrifying daily routine where they did everything in their power to find their next high. You’d see these helpless parents and family members who couldn’t do anything to stop them. Many of them would actually pay for their daughter’s drugs because they knew if they didn’t, they would go prostitute themselves to pay for them. You’d finally go through this incredibly emotional intervention where everyone tells the addict how much they love them.
The addict would then accept help to go to a rehab facility. Then, after all of that, they’d give you a 5 second closing title card updating you on what happened. Most of them would read something like this: “Amy lasted three days in rehab before they caught her sneaking in dope. She was kicked out and now lives on the streets. Her family hasn’t seen her in months and fear that she might be dead.” There are only so many episodes of that you can take before you say, “NO THANKS!” So I quit Intervention.
However, this leads us to our first screenwriting tip of the day. I love the idea of taking popular reality TV shows, or reality docudramas, and looking for a feature film spin on them. You can always do that with horror, which is what our writer did today. You could do the same with Hoarders (has anyone done a hoarder horror movie yet?) or that Bear Grills show, where he takes regular people out in the middle of nowhere and tries to survive. What if you wrote a movie where the Bear Grills character died early on and the hero had to survive all by himself? This is just off the top of my head. I’m sure there are tons of other shows you could do this for.
But as we always say here on Scriptshadow, coming up with the idea is only half the battle. The other half is doing something with it. Let’s see if this Black List newcomer was able to intervene himself to an impressive execution.
50-something Warren is one of the best interventionists in the world, due in part to the enormous success of his book, “The Interventionist: A Story of Addiction and Redemption.” That’s right. Part of the reason Warren is so good at his job is that he used to be an addict himself.
Despite his career success, Warren’s a big fat failure in the family department. He and his wife, Marie, divorced a long time ago. And his adult daughter, Christy, is a hardcore heroin addict. When Marie comes back into Warren’s life to ask him to save their daughter, the decision is both easy and difficult. Of course he wants to save his daughter. There’s only one problem – she hates him.
Marie picks Warren up and brings him up to their old lake house, where the intervention will take place. Christy’s boyfriend is bringing her up here under the guise of spending a romantic weekend together. Joining the pack is Richard, Marie’s perfect new husband.
When Christy finally shows up, she’s furious at being tricked. And while everyone tries to get the intervention started, slices of the past are injected into the proceedings that add context to their situation. It turns out Warren’s negligence led to Christy’s little sister drowning when she was four years old – a big reason why Christy has turned to a life of drugs. But as the intervention continues, we realize just how deep the negligence goes. Maybe the interventionist wasn’t as clean, at the time, as he’d led everyone to believe. Until he can admit that to himself, Christy will never find peace.
There are a lot of good things about this script.
I love the setting. Place your characters in a house in the middle of nowhere and you’ve got yourself a movie that can be made. That’s huge. So many of the decisions that color how someone reads your script revolve around, “Can this be made?” If you can come up with a NEW HOOK (not an old one!) that utilizes this setup, your script is going to have an advantage over tons of other more expensive screenplays, even if those scripts are better than yours.
And I like that there’s a clear objective with this concept. We’re going to this house TO GET A JOB DONE. It’s not like all of these weak movies where a group of teenagers drive out to a remote house then horror shenanigans begin. This setup is structured. And when you have that structure built into your concept, the chances of you writing a good screenplay increase dramatically.
I also like how much emphasis Bannon puts on the characters and the relationships. This movie is all about character development and conflict resolution, which ensures that it’s going to connect more deeply with the audience. And it should be noted that this is INHERENT in the concept. If you write a movie about intervention and drug addiction, you’re organically going to be be exploring characters.
All of this makes it frustrating that the script doesn’t deliver on its premise. And it’s a classic screenwriting problem that occurs with this specific setup. After the first 45 minutes of these contained setting stories, the writer starts feeling boxed in and resorts to gimmicks, scary imagery and reality-questioning (What’s real?? What isn’t??). These things are fine in small doses. But when you start depending on them every other page, you’re pressing. Whenever I encounter this, I can tell the writer is losing confidence in his story.
The breaking point for me was when Warren successfully convinced Christy to go to rehab. They drive out that very moment (to a rehab that’s, what, 1000 miles away??), Christy turns into a psycho zombie and steers the car into a lake, Warren almost drowns, survives, walks back to the house, and we continue the intervention like nothing happened, then two pages later Christy is levitating in the air.
I’m like, “Okay, that’s it. I’m out.” It was too much.
And I know that there were reasons for these things happening (Christy was, essentially, being possessed by her dead sister at this point). But even that didn’t make complete sense. I mean, your daughter is floating in the middle of the room and everybody’s focused on continuing the intervention? At that point I’m thinking the objective has changed.
This became the big issue with the end of the movie, as it got messier and messier. While there’s an argument to be made that you want things to get crazier as we move towards our climax, there has to be some structure to it. Like with The Exorcist. There was some crazy-ass shit going on there at the end. But we were never confused about what was going on or what the priest needed to do to succeed. Whereas here, there was more of an “anything goes” mentality. And that’s too bad because, like I said, there’s a lot here to celebrate.
A big pet peeve of mine is messiness. Once I sense things getting too messy, I check out. And, unfortunately, that was the case here. At least for me. What did you think?
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: This is a great example of building a story around an ironic main character. Irony in your main character almost always works. Warren is an interventionist who’s a drug addict.
