Joe Sheldon - Preliminary Film Idea

Genre: Crime Drama / Thriller

Overview:

Three 17 year old students return from a trip out and walk through a field to get home. They are Gemma, Thomas and Charlie; they’re all fairly high achieving students with a long lasting friendship. Upon walking through the field, they find a dead body between the trees and attempt to phone for the police. However, none of them have phone signal and it’s late at night, so they attempt to move the body somewhere lighter and out of the woods so that the authorities can see it when they come. Not thinking, all three of them touch the body to move it and as a result all three of them become suspects in a crime none of them committed. Under pressure from the police, his family and his own consciousness, Charlie takes the blame for the crime and is sentenced to life. Both Gemma and Tom go on to do well at university.

In prison, Charlie is often kept away from people because of his crime at such a young age. He begins to suffer psychological torment and his two ‘friends’ become the figures representative to him of how his life went wrong. He befriends CJ, Georgia and Frankie in prison, hatching a plan in his insanity to find and kill his two childhood friends. Despite his urges to hurt people and his declining mental state in prison, he keeps the pretence of normality to be let out on good behaviour, which charlie gets at age 30.

However, out of prison Charlie realises he loves Georgia and his thoughts begin to become clearer. Sometimes he begins to question his motives, and is in two minds about whether to kill either of his childhood friends. Charlie finds Gemma in her London home and initially thinks he’s going there to apologise. However, he find’s that she’s sleeping and takes a look around her apartment, finding she’s got great wealth and many pictures of her and Thomas from their university days. This angers him, and so he smothers her with her pillow and kills her. He rummages around in her kitchen draws to find Thomas’ address. Upon checking into a central London hotel, he cries over what he’s done and attempts to take his own life, although he wakes up the next morning having failed.

He finds Thomas, hitchhiking to Manchester to find him. Charlie turns up to the road and is surprised to find it’s a council estate. Thomas is surrounded by needles and rubbish in a dark and dingy home. Thomas is pleased to see Charlie when he turns up, which adds to his moral conflict. They have a long one to one chat in which Thomas explains how he couldn’t get a job because of his involvement with Charlie before he was convicted and turned to a life of petty crime and drugs. Charlie begins to hate himself and in a bad fit of guilt that night, he kills himself.

The film ends with a soliloquy from Thomas about how resentment is in the human condition but it doesn’t have to consume you, and how friendship is always meant to be something helpful. A bad friendship is no friendship at all.

Opening two minutes:

The friends are on a train, with an establishing shot from the window of the train. There is a brief conversation about the day and then the train comes to a halt, slowing at a platform. The opening credits are on black title cards placed between shots. It uses a bold red font to stand out and create an unnerving effect for the audience. I am hoping this will help set a tone of danger,as the opening scenes are meant to be somewhat distressing in nature.

They are walking across an open field with shopping bags, with brief laughter between them to contrast the darker tone. The field has dark tones, with sweeping shots from ground helping to set a slower pace before the crux of the opening two minutes.

They find the body and they react to it, with individual facial reaction shots. I plan for them to linger for a little longer than they should to build suspense. Gemma and Thomas are in action, talking about phoning authorities in panicked voices. The teenagers have a conversation collectively about what to do and attempt to call the police, only to find they have no service. They move to find service and bring the body with them so that the police can find them easier.