A darkly comic psychological horror.
Because real life can be so much worse.
Eugene Laing hires an actress to recreate his mother’s final day. As her performance begins to feel like possession, their reconstruction leads them towards the death he has spent his life trying to understand.
Grief / performance / the need to get the past exactly right
You cannot repair the past by making someone live it again.
But you can change what you do when it comes back.
Awkward hospitality, technical arguments and increasingly impossible direction. The humour brings us close; the dread grows when the actress takes control and the director begins responding as her child.
Charger arguments. Beef tea. A weasel called Kelly. The absurd business of getting sadness exactly right.
Women digging holes. A buried hand. An archive of previous attempts. Eugene looks like a murderer. He is not.
Forbidden rooms and rotten floors. The building remembers Eugene’s life; its physical danger needs no ghost.
Kelly begins making choices nobody has directed. Her mastery looks supernatural. She is extraordinarily good at her job.
We never show you a ghost. That does not mean you won’t feel her there.
For years, Eugene has filmed actresses repeating fragments of a woman’s life: crying in a car, sitting in an empty bath, walking into the sea, digging in the rain. He tells Kelly she is playing a fictional woman called Laura. But she gets details right before he tells her what they are.
With Eugene’s old friend and sound recordist Ray, the work becomes a strange, beautiful film. Then Ray falls through the rotten floor of Eugene’s childhood bedroom and dies. At the funeral, Kelly learns that Laura was Eugene’s mother. She died by suicide when he was eleven. His film is an attempt to reconstruct the last day he saw her alive.
Kelly returns. Together they put the fragments in order: a packed lunch, forgotten crisps, the sea, a buried teddy bear and biscuit tin, chips, tea, a hair appointment for the following week. Sinister images become an ordinary day. Eventually Kelly proposes living it from beginning to end, without a camera, with Eugene in the place of his younger self.
They reach the errand that took him out of the house. This time he returns, finds Kelly on the stairs and intervenes. He can stay where the child could not. But Kelly cannot tell him why his mother died. Their reconstruction is something they have made together, not recovered truth.
The next morning Kelly leaves for the ferry. Another self-tape awaits. Eugene has no simple answer, but he is no longer standing outside the moment.
Even the title participates: the house does not burn. The images stand. Their meaning changes.
Quiet, watchful, exacting. An ordinary, decent man whose attention can look like menace. He makes tea, worries about Kelly’s room and remembers behaviour better than he expresses feeling.
Wants: to understand his mother’s death.
Needs: to stop judging the child he was.
Fears: that he was there and still “wasn’t enough.”
An adult man with an eleven-year-old boy still intact inside him.
Practical, curious, proud. A working actor who checks the rate and wants to do the job well. She stays because the work is compelling, then starts to direct the investigation herself.
Wants: to solve Laura.
Needs: to recognise that empathy is not knowledge.
Fears: that Eugene no longer sees her.
Mastery that looks supernatural without playing the supernatural. Secret: she likes it, too.
Funny, practical, technically obsessive. Eugene’s oldest friend, sound recordist and occasional safety officer. Ray remembers Laura as a living, irritating, funny person, not a puzzle.
Wants: to help Eugene finish.
Needs: to keep one foot in the real world.
Fears: precision overriding common sense.
The person who makes the room feel safer. Their absence is why it hurts.
On the night Laura died, eleven-year-old Eugene went to Ray’s house. Ray was not there. That old guilt is part of why Ray has kept helping, though it is not the whole of their friendship.
Home. Film set. Archive. Evidence.
Neglected, not ruined. Once grand, now faded. Beautiful enough to understand why Eugene never left; deteriorated enough to become dangerous.
We learn one coherent building. Doorways separate people; the stairs connect different levels of knowledge. The same route through familiar rooms gradually becomes unbearable.
Schematic adapted from the pitch’s floor plan. Spatial relationships, not a measured construction drawing.
Director’s statement / Alec Bowman_Clarke
“I want the audience to fear Eugene before they understand him.”
What interests me is the moment a frightening image becomes more disturbing because we understand it. A child’s coat. A sandwich made exactly right. A grown man waiting for someone playing his mother to tell him what happens next.
Eugene remembers what she did. He cannot understand why. Kelly takes the work seriously enough to discover something his instructions cannot give her. We learn to watch as closely as he does, until she does something he has not asked for.
The humour matters: tea, chargers, bad jokes. I want us to enjoy their company even while we fear what they are doing. At the centre are two adult performers becoming a mother and her little boy. Eugene cannot change the past. The reconstruction may get him close enough to stop trying.
A feature brings writing, performance, images, sound and logistics into one demanding form. I have the equipment, experience, patience and a trusted circle of collaborators. Casting and location scouting are underway.
The ambition is a beautiful, moving Scottish independent film made with very little money. Money buys time and reach; it cannot guarantee an original idea. Horror can begin in the distance between loving somebody and understanding them.
Filmmakers such as Curry Barker and Kane Parsons make the possibility of reaching audiences outside established routes tangible. This film’s audience should be larger than the scale of its production.
The film moves quickly.
The images are allowed to wait.
Tea, cables, directions, waiting for light. Repetition and correction slowly turn professional precision into something frightening. In the final act, the frames hold and the audience must stay inside an experience the film will not explain away.
Robert Wise
Architecture as pressure. Legible rooms, corridors and stairs accumulate tension without spectacle.
Charlotte Wells
The ordinary image becomes unbearable. Meaning arrives later, through fragments and what someone failed to understand.
David Robert Mitchell
Readable space. Wide compositions let us search for danger before being told where to look.
Céline Sciamma
Looking as action. Faces and repeated gestures matter because somebody has learned to watch.
A conversation with these films’ methods, rather than a gallery of borrowed images. The pitch also places the film alongside Vertigo and Censor.
Wet, faded, used, real. Water has got in. Timber is worn smooth. Mud travels from woods to dress to house. A rabbit mug, a biscuit tin, Bear and a Bovril jar become loaded through repetition. The dress is practical, increasingly dirty; never spectral.
The proposed 1.85:1 frame preserves vertical relationships while leaving room for bodies to become isolated. Doors divide; stairs connect; windows separate. Movement is selective. Cuts change information rather than merely relieving discomfort.
Cool, soft, directional daylight. Readable darkness. Warmth from practical lamps. Rain and wet surfaces catching what little light there is. The final act becomes more ordinary, not more expressionistic.
Light references: Decision to Leave, The Night House, The Woman in the Window, Watcher.
Eugene has learned to make beautiful images. Their beauty draws Kelly into the work and makes his obsession compelling before its cost becomes clear.
Image references: Nocturnal Animals, Night Swim, Quién te cantará, The Northman.
The camera observes.
The performance disturbs.
Arrive before the action; remain after it. When a performance flows, the camera does less.
A push, pan or handheld shift matters because the surrounding film is controlled.
How someone holds a mug, opens a bag or waits in a doorway. Behaviour before emotion.
Kelly never plays possession. Eugene never plays menace. Ray never plays impending tragedy. Everyone behaves truthfully.
Camera and performance references: The Innocents; Seven.
Sound belongs to the world.
Score arrives when the world isn’t enough.
Rain, sea, wind and tyres on wet roads create pressure. We hear the island continuously changing.
Plumbing, boards, fabric, distant rooms, electrical hum. Old, occupied and imperfect; nothing supernatural.
Room tone, levels, playback, cables. Ray makes us conscious of captured sound. Later, that familiar voice is gone.
Patient, daunting, angry, beautiful. Repetition and pulse give the obsession emotional weight, without making it supernatural.
Josienne Clarke is attached as composer.
Score references: Drive; Vertigo.
Contains story developments
A woman digs in a white nightdress, in rain and darkness. Eugene corrects tiny details. It looks like the aftermath of murder. Later, the same action means something else.
The image does not change. The information does.
Ray establishes a safe route over the damaged floor. Eugene wants accuracy; Kelly performs; Ray moves. The floor gives way.
A real building. A practical decision. Cause and effect.
They put away the camera and live the day. Bath, car, sea, woods, chips, kitchen, bedroom. At the point his memory stops, Eugene returns and intervenes.
The reconstruction changes. The past does not.
Small footprint.
Big ambition.
Woods, roads, beach, ferry, rain. Use real landscape and weather whenever practical. The exterior world is already here.
One principal location does the heavy lifting. A coherent geography, learned through repeated visits.
Prep hard. Rehearse properly. Shoot deliberately. Fewer, better shots. Protect performance, sound and weather opportunities.
Rain, sea work, night exteriors, floor collapse and staircase action need separate planning, rehearsal and engineering. Danger on screen. Safety on set.
One feature, eleven manageable blocks. Prepared and rehearsed in blocks; scheduled around cast, locations and weather.
| Kitchen | 19.5 | 33.9% |
|---|---|---|
| Living room | 10.7 | 18.6% |
| Hall / stairs | 8.9 | 15.5% |
| Childhood bedroom | 8.5 | 14.8% |
| Bathroom | 4.6 | 8.0% |
| Landing | 2.3 | 4.0% |
| Kelly’s bedroom | 2.1 | 3.7% |
| Unspecified | 0.8 | 1.5% |
Eugene 82 / Kelly 79 / Ray 17.
Woman in the woods 4 / paramedics 2 / crematorium guest 1.
43 scenes feature Eugene and Kelly.
10 feature Eugene, Kelly and Ray.
Two sea sequences: 5.0 pages.
Floor collapse: 4.4 pages.
Stairway confrontation: 4.7 pages.
Crematorium crowd: 1.7 pages.
Ferry terminal crowd: 1.5 pages.
Pitch-deck estimates. Location page totals are approximate; character speaking-page counts overlap. 89 screenplay pages, excluding the title page. Schedule proposed, not confirmed.
We know what film we want to make.
That doesn’t mean we know every answer.
A finished screenplay, a clear visual language, a realistic production model and experience making ambitious work with small crews. Alec Bowman_Clarke is attached as writer-director; Josienne Clarke as composer.
Thorough preparation. Clear communication. Decisions made, performance protected, safety ensured and each other’s time valued.
A producing partner with creative judgement and practical independent-feature experience: to test the budget and schedule, build the team and shape financing that protects the film’s independence.
Partners through production, post and delivery, then sales and distribution. Help us find the right route to an audience.
Script, production materials & further information available on request.
This film deals with suicide, grief, loss and the people left trying to understand what happened. If these issues affect you or someone you know, support is available.
Someone to listen, free, day or night.
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