Genre: Contained Thriller
Premise: A weekend tryst between two cheating spouses goes south when the husband of the woman finds out and makes them pay in the most unimaginable ways possible.
About: This one was acquired by 1984 Defense Contractors (“The Grey”) a couple of years ago. Before selling the script, the writer, Elliot San, wrote and acted in a comedy troupe in Muncie, Indiana.
Writer: Elliot San
Details: 96 pages
What caught my attention with this script was that it was said to be in the same vein as Hard Candy, the 2005 film about an older man who preys on a younger girl online, and when he brings her home, realizes that he’s the prey.
It was a good movie (Ellen Paige’s debut) and I realized that we haven’t had a good contained thriller in the vein of Hard Candy in forever. So let this be an official shout-out to those of you looking to sell a script, that this is the perfect sub-genre to write in.
It costs NOTHING to shoot. And it stands out from 90% of the other contained thrillers just by not being a horror script.
Assuming you go this route, You’ll Be The Death of Me is your competition. It’s already made a splash. I’m sure someone is out there trying to make it. Let’s see if it’s good enough to be the next Hard Candy.
40-something Holly seems to have a good life going for her. She’s got a husband, Russell, who loves her, and a daughter in college. Yet we get the sense that the recent uptick in Holly’s business trips is straining the marriage.
When Holly heads out on one of those trips, we learn that they’re more personal in nature than she’s letting on. As in, she’s been banging some pool boy for the past six months. And this particular getaway in Palm Springs is going to be the biggest and craziest sex-a-thon yet.
Oh, it’ll be big and crazy all right. Just not how she planned it. You see, Russell figured out what was going on. And instead of going the whole “lawyer up,” route, he’s going to have some fun at his wife’s and Everett’s expense.
He kidnaps Everett ahead of time, brings him to the hotel room, and tells him that his only job is to keep Holly in that room until tomorrow morning. If Holly leaves that room before then, Russell will kill Everett’s wife and daughter, who he’s holding hostage.
Russell then leaves, Holly never knowing he was there, and calls her, pretending to be back at home. He informs Holly that he knows she’s with Everett and that Everett is a killer. Holly, he believes, will be his next victim. Holly must get out of that room at all costs.
And hence begins a life-or-death game of both lovers attempting to outwit one another, unknowingly going up against a likewise manipulated foe. Who’s going to come out with their pants on? I can promise you this. You’ll have no idea unless you read the script.
I LOVED the way this script started. You guys should all read the opening of You’ll Be The Death of Me. It starts out by breaking the rules, giving us a dialogue scene (you rarely want to start with a straight dialogue scene) that takes place on the phone in a car (the characters engaging in the dialogue aren’t even together!). Can you ask for a scene that’s more designed to bore an audience?
Here’s why it works though.
SUBTEXT
Holly, who’s in the car, is talking to her husband, Russell, about seemingly unimportant things (their daughter’s college life, for example). As they continue talking, we get the sense that the conversation is boring Holly. Not in a normal husband-wife know-everything-about-each-other way. But that she has something else she’d rather focus on.
And what that does is it creates a question in the reader: “Why does she want to get off the phone with her husband so badly?”
Once you have the reader questioning the situation, you’ve got them hooked, at least temporarily. And San starts dropping more bait crumbs for us. Holly mentions her “conference” that she’s going to. Russell says, “I thought you said it wasn’t a conference.”
Okay, now we know Holly is lying. Why is she lying? Whether we like it or not, the writer has us in the palm of his hands. We want to know where this is going and that, my friends, is how you pen an opening scene that hooks the reader.
Once Holly gets to the hotel, we sense that something is off. Everett, the man she’s cheating with, isn’t around. He’s left messages with instructions for her instead. Something’s up. The suspense is building. We want to see what’s going to happen here because we know it’s probably going to be bad (pro tip: simple suspense is implying something bad is going to happen then suspending the outcome of that moment).
For the first 15 pages, I was so onboard with You’ll Be The Death of Me.
And then San makes a risky choice. He has Russell threaten Everett, secretly telling him that if Holly leaves that room before tomorrow morning, he will kill Everett’s family.
He then calls up Holly, and secretly tells her he knows she’s having an affair, and that Everett is a killer.
In the immortal words of Saturday Morning Cartoons: “WAH WAH WAHHHHHHH.”
First of all, if you’re a wife having an affair and your husband calls you while you’re with the other man and tells you he’s a killer, what’s your first response going to be? I’m assuming it’s something along the lines of “bullshit.” Your husband has every reason to want to get you away from this man or make you scared of him. So of course he’ll lie.
And this is something I’ve been trying to tell screenwriters forever, and something they don’t want to listen to: Before you have a character do something incredulous, ask yourself if this were the real world, would that character still do what you’re having them do?
If the answer is no, readers are going to call bullshit on you. Russell is written as a smart man. A real life smart man isn’t going to try and pull something over on a wife that she would never believe. And likewise, a real-life wife would never believe that thing even if her husband was dumb enough to try it.
Unfortunately, when a mistake like this is built into the conceit, it disqualifies everything that happens after it. If we don’t believe in how we got here, we can’t believe in what follows.
But here’s the thing about You’ll Be The Death of Me. It adds ANOTHER twist that throws everything you thought you knew out the window. It becomes a completely different story.
And I’ll be the first to admit, despite the thousands of screenplays I’ve read, I had NO FUCKING CLUE what was going on. I couldn’t venture a guess at who was pulling the strings if you gave me temporary access to Einstein’s brain.
Now was the script perfectly constructed? It was not. But it takes chances and after it hits that midpoint, it always stays ahead of you. It’s enough to keep you entertained, that’s for sure.
The contained relationship thriller is like a secret weapon sub-genre. Not many people write them, so the competition is minimal, they’re cheap to make, since they’re one location, and they’re easy to market, so producers want them. It’s the trifecta! So if you’ve got a good idea for a contained relationship thriller, the market is due for one. Take advantage!
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Be careful with scripts where there’s no one to root for. They can still work as thrillers because the audience is there for the thrills as much as they are the characters. But in You’ll Be The Death of Me, you have a cheating wife, a cheating husband, and a man who’s torturing them. Who do we root for in that scenario? Even if we’re left thrilled by the breakneck pace and clever plotting, we feel empty at the finish line because we never had anyone to latch onto. So if you’re going to write one of these films, try and add someone to root for!
