Genre: Thriller
Premise: When a psychiatrist and his sickly wife travel to their country cabin for a quiet Thanksgiving weekend, they will have to deal with an unexpected visit from one of his patients, who claims his dead twin brother is after him for revenge.
About: This script finished with 11 votes on last year’s Black List.
Writer: Dani Feito
Details: 113 pages
(note: I strongly encourage you to read this script before reading the review. This is a spoiler-heavy screenplay).
A funny thing happened when I went through the loglines on the 2024 Black List to see what to review today. There isn’t a single logline on that list that’s better than the top 75 loglines in the Blood & Ink Showdown.
My bar for loglines has risen considerably after this month. And everything on the Black List is just so tame in comparison to what we were able to generate for the Blood & Ink Contest. So, good on you guys.
The reason behind my decision to read this script is that I like these setups. I like when people are in a remote area and you throw some potentially dangerous x-factor character into the mix. I love the psychological games that are played in those early parts of the screenplay, before all has been revealed. I like that you can take advantage of dramatic irony, choosing which information to share with the reader before sharing it with the characters. They’re just fun setups to play with and fun setups to read.
But this is the Black List! And as I was just telling a couple of writers the other day, the industry only pays attention to the top 5 scripts on the list these days. I’m the only one in town who really pays attention to anything past the top 10. And I do that because there are still a handful of gems in those bottom 60 and it’s fun to discover them.
Case in point: There is a swimming pool.
Extra Scriptshadow points to those who know that reference.
Is today’s script the next “there is a swimming pool?” Let’s find out.
Dr. Howard Lacey, 50s, is a psychiatrist who’s recently ventured into podcasting to detail some of his patients’ woes. Specializing in twins, his latest series focuses on David, who had a twin brother with cerebral palsy. Later in life, his brother would die in an accidental fire in his home and David has always felt guilty about it.
Howard is looking forward to Thanksgiving with his wife, Karen, who’s recovering from open heart surgery after a heart attack. The two head up to their remote cabin in the mountains and share a meal with their neighbors, George and Megan.
Afterwards, Howard gets a call. His patient, David, is outside the house! He claims that his brother is trying to kill him. Karen is terrified and begins hyperventilating but Howard insists he can de-escalate the situation, letting David in.
David insists his brother is in the house. Karen is deteriorating quickly. Howard gets into a scuffle with David. And the next thing we know, David has Howard on the floor and strangles him to death. He then turns to Karen, insisting that she is his dead twin, and comes to kill her but it doesn’t matter. She has a heart attack and dies.
(Spoilers start now)
As soon as she dies, Howard stands up. He’s… fine? Not only is he fine but David starts speaking in a British accent? Ah, it turns out that this was planned out months ago. David is a completely constructed person. He never had a twin. It was all a lie to lead up to this moment. Howard’s business is crumbling. He’s in financial duress. And his wife (along with all her annoying medical expenses) was bleeding him dry. So he needed her 5 million dollar life insurance policy.
Howard and David rejoice. Howard goes to get David’s share of the money and when he comes back, shoots David. He was never going to give this punk a dime. He then orchestrates a pretend freaked out phone call to the police, and soon they’re there. But there is now a problem. It turns out that Karen is still breathing!
They take Karen to the hospital as Howard tries to figure out what to do. That’s when he’s confronted by Amanda. Amanda is David’s ACTUAL twin! And she wants the money that was owed to David. When the hospital only agrees to release Karen back to Howard if there is a nurse present, Howard and Amanda concoct a plan where she’ll be the nurse and the two will scare Karen to death (as Amanda will pretend to be David’s original ghost twin) so she’ll have her final heart attack. Will this plan work? You tell me!
When screenwriter Dani Feito went to the Twist Store on La Brea and Olympic to buy herself a prime twist for her screenplay, the store must’ve been offering a deal. Cause instead of picking up just one, she bought half a dozen!
Does it all work?
No.
You can’t possibly make a script work with that many twists. But, is the script entertaining?
Welllllllllll… let me put it this way: It sure as hell tries to be.
Everything leading up to that first twist is great. I mean it really is. I thought I might be giving out an “impressive” rating, which doesn’t come often for Black List scripts these days.
But a big question lingered: How does a script with 80 pages left to go get better after a world-beater of a twist? I didn’t see how it was possible. And I turned out to be right.
Every 20 pages of Twin Soul gets sillier than the previous 20 pages.
The first issue was the hospital. We were neck-deep in conflict and suspense and excitement for those first 30 pages. Everything before that twist was built up at the perfect pace. Now, all of a sudden, we’re waiting around? Doing nothing?
Feito has to abide by some level of real-world believability in regards to the hospital and police allowing Karen to come back home. So, we have to wait 24-48 hours for her to be released from the hospital. And, when that happened, all the momentum and energy seeped out of the story like air out of a cheap balloon.
Then David’s real twin, Amanda, shows up, and I knew the script was cooked. It feels way too forced. And then when the two come up with a plan to work together to kill Karen, whereby Amanda is going to be pretend to be the nurse – any hope that the script could rebound melted away like ice cream on a hot summer day.
Why didn’t this work?
Because the writer already established a very clever first act. I wouldn’t say it was perfect in the sense that you could believe Howard would get away with it. But it was definitely plausible. He thought of everything and was very careful about even the smallest of details.
Meanwhile, once the wife comes back to the house and he and Amanda are planning to kill her again, Howard literally does two-dozen sloppy things that any cop would easily catch. In retrospect, it destroyed that genius opening. Because all of that meticulous planning was erased by the sloppiest murder plan ever.
How could this have been fixed?
For one, the script can’t be 113 pages. It needs to be 100. More pages just means more areas to screw up in a script like this. Keep it lean. Have the shocking murder twist happen at the midpoint as opposed to the end of the first act. Now, you only have 50 pages to fill instead of 80. You’re in a much more manageable place structurally.
I would get rid of the stupid female twin character and bring in a real mandatory nurse for Karen, as was originally suggested by the hospital. That nurse is the only thing standing in the way between Howard being able to kill his wife or not. You could add some ticking time bomb whereby Karen’s mom, who lives across the country, is showing up in two days to help her daughter recover. So, he’s only got two days to kill her. And this nurse character gives you one more opportunity for a final twist (she could have her own agenda).
In other words, keep it simple. Where these scripts suffer is when writers try to add too many variables. The more variables, the more sloppy things are, the more the writer has to keep track of. And because it’s impossible to keep track of everything, you inevitably create a ton of plot holes.
There were so many good things in the first 30 pages of this script. But with how spectacularly the plot falls apart after that, I unfortunately can’t recommend it.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Cleverness in screenwriting demands precision. There’s no tolerance for sloppiness, not even a trace. When you promise the audience intelligence, you’re committing to a script without holes. In fact, you want the opposite: every creative choice must be meticulously crafted and purposeful. That level of care clearly wasn’t maintained in Twin Soul beyond the first act. Which is too bad. Because boy what a first act it was.
