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Genre: Mystery
Premise: A mommy vlogger’s child goes missing but when the detective assigned to the case starts looking into it, she suspects that the missing child may not exist.
About: Not much is known about this writer. She seems to be new on the scene. This script finished with 13 votes, placing it in the top third of the list.
Writer: Brenna Galvin
Details: 104 pages
Gemma Chan for Marie?
Somebody has gone missing.
It’s one of the most tried-and-true setups in storytelling. You’ve got a clear goal, clear stakes, and clear urgency, right out of the gate.
There is a funny quirk about the sub-genre, though. It tends to do a lot better in the literary world than the movie world.
I looked up movies about missing people and there aren’t as many as you’d think there would be. Gone Girl, Missing, The Black Phone, Prisoners, Taken. But with books, it seems like every other book is about a woman who’s gone missing.
I suspect that’s because the audience for missing person’s stories is women. And when it comes to fiction books, that audience is mainly women. Whereas, with movies, the demographic is slightly skewed towards men.
Therefore, the only breakout missing-person’s movies have to be these gigantic mega-selling books, like Gone Girl or The Lovely Bones.
It’s surprising that’s the case, though. Cause, like I pointed out, it’s got all of the main ingredients built into the setup. I’m guessing one of the reasons we don’t see it as much is because it’s hard to make these movies feel different.
Japanese-American 20-something MARIE OKADA-GREEN is a mommy vlogger for her 4 year old daughter, Daisy. She also has a 4 year old son, Henry, who she doesn’t talk about on the vlog.
Marie is not one of these super vloggers who pretend to know everything about raising a child. She’s figuring it out and sharing her journey along the way. But she’s amassed a pretty big following, with a quarter of a million people who watch her vlog.
By the way, we don’t see Henry or Daisy when the movie starts other than seeing Daisy through pictures and videos on the vlog. Marie goes to pick Henry up after his first day of preschool and is told that he never showed up. That’s impossible, Marie says. I dropped him off myself. But they don’t have any record of him being present that day.
The cops are immediately called and a female detective is assigned to the case. Marie also brings in her sister, Autumn, who, by the way, has never seen Henry in her life. Marie didn’t want Henry to have contact with Autumn because Autumn is close with their mother, Kiki, and Marie hates her mom.
This is when we learn that there is no Daisy. There was only Henry. When Marie first started the vlog, she made a snap decision to protect her son’s identity and make him a girl. When the cops learn this, they think Marie is a little bananas and start wondering if there is a “Henry.” Because nobody’s actually seen Henry.
After a good 30 pages goes by with everyone scrambling to find out the truth, Henry is eventually found! A woman named Kat has Henry. She claims that she adopted Henry from Marie and has the adoption papers to prove it. At this point, the cop doesn’t have any idea what’s going on. But the documents look legit so she closes the case. But Marie still insists that Henry is her son. So she puts on her big thinking cap to figure out how to get her son back. Things only get crazier from there.
One of the harder things for me to reconcile is that the Black List is no longer a “Best of” list. It’s a “Here are The Best Writers At The Beginning of Their Screenwriting Journey” list. The difference between now and those older lists is, now, you can really see the writer working out how to write a screenplay as you’re reading it.
They don’t quite know what they’re doing yet. But they’re trying the best they can. For instance, in order to construct this storyline, the writer has to create so many extreme coincidences that it’s just not believable what’s happening.
Marie has never shown her child to a single person? Not even her sister, who she’s close with? Not even her mother? Four years and nobody has ever since this kid? Maybe you could get away with that in 1980 if Marie lived in some remote part of Alabama. But in 2024, in the city?
Something I occasionally talk about here is “buy in.” When the buy in is cheap, the reader will always go along with it. But when the buy in gets expensive, you run into readers who’ll take their business elsewhere. This is an expensive buy in – that nobody has ever seen this child.
The problem with expensive buy in – even for readers who reluctantly pay and keep reading – is that the reader is now less trustful of the writer. Their thinking is, “They tried to pull one fast one on me. What else are they going to try to pull?”
And that’s the real problem. Because once you’ve informed the reader that you don’t play by the rules, they’re looking for you to cheat again. And the second you do, they’re out. So, what happens next in this story? Well, they discover that Marie gave Henry up for adoption and this other woman, Kat, adopted him. She had no idea people were even looking for Henry.
But wait. Kat wasn’t aware of a national story about a missing child named Henry? The name of her child? Who looks EXACTLY like her child? No, apparently not. Kat tells us she was offline for three weeks so she didn’t know this was going on. I mean, come on. This is when you start insulting the reader’s intelligence.
I’m not going to go into this too much but a common thing that happens with new writers is they easily convince themselves that flimsy story threads are solid.
I recently saw this screenwriter’s tweet that went something like this: “If you want to drive yourself crazy, write a mystery.” I get what he’s saying. A mystery requires you to create this elaborate jumbled puzzle. And piecing that puzzle together in both a pleasing and challenging way is hard. Cause it puts you in these situations like the above – where you have to explain something that doesn’t make sense. Kat has been off the grid for 3 weeks and had no idea the world was looking for her child? It’s not easy to explain that away. But that doesn’t mean you can just hope the reader goes with it.
It’s stuff like this that makes me question the Black List’s criteria. Cause that isn’t even the last twist. There are three more major twists, all of which make the story less and less believable. It’s not lost on me that the script is Benchedel Test friendly. There isn’t a single xy chromosome in the screenplay and I know the Black List loves that. Is that the reason this script made the list?
Who knows? Cause, like I said, this is more of a “writers to watch out for” list now than it is a series of scripts that are ready to be movies.
Did I like anything about this script?
I liked the idea of a woman creating a fake child in order to become a mommy blogger. That is a great commentary on our society today. I can actually imagine that happening. If the story would’ve stuck with that and that alone, this script could’ve been good. But it just got too complicated.
Which is one more opportunity for me to remind you of the most important screenwriting advice you’ll ever hear: KEEP IT SIMPLE. The more complex you make your plot, the more likely it is that the script will fall apart.
It’s not that complex plots can’t be done. But they’re not something that a screenwriter writing one of their first five sceenplays should bother themselves with. I can pretty much guarantee that if you’re a writer writing one of your first five scripts and you try to make it super complex, it will fall apart.
It takes time to learn how to navigate complex plotting. It’s much trickier than it looks. It’s better to learn how to tell a great simple story. Only once you’ve mastered that should you start layering complexity into your scripts.
Not for me, guys. Just wasn’t believable.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Sometimes you have to introduce a character but you don’t have time to stop and properly describe them because, for whatever reason, the scene needs to keep moving. This is a great way to do that. You just add some parentheses and informally tell the reader that more details are forthcoming.
“She takes special care with a PHOTO of herself and a handsome guy (we’ll come to know as late husband PAUL).”
