Story
It’s about a world-weary, vacant hitman named Ellis. He and his psychopathic, arsehole partner Kane, who relishes in other people’s pain, drive from the city to the Scottish countryside to kill a young man. Ellis and Kane clash, due to their different personalities, and decide to split up.
Ellis tracks down the target to a makeshift camp in a forest. When he gets injured, he finds himself at his target’s mercy. While initially he fears for his life, he is forced to recognise his target, Sonny, as a real person. Sonny is drowning in guilt due to an accident that changed his young life forever. Sonny tries to consider the future, but it’s opaque. He struggles to see a future with himself in it.
Ellis comes to sympathise with him and questions his own moral choices. He decides not to kill Sonny. He considers his own soul to be black beyond repair. But, perhaps as a final act of redemption, he decides to help Sonny instead, for better or worse.
Themes
The film deals with ideas of taking responsibility, guilt and forgiveness. As Sonny and Ellis reflect upon their past mistakes, they consider the possibility of divine forgiveness. The film deals with the conflict between traditional religious ideas and more currently prevalent nihilistic outlooks.
Tone and Style
We’re drawing a lot from genres like film noir and westerns. It’s set in a stylized reality seen in these kinds of genre films. It is intentionally anachronistic. By this I mean that it isn’t set in any one specific time period, for example, a character might use a revolver and wear 30s styled clothing, but they use a mobile phone and drive a modern car. We’d like to reflect this in the dialogue too, which at times is going to verge on archaic, flowery and poetic.
The film is dark, however, it uses humour sparingly to lighten the otherwise relentless tone, because things do get pretty bloody by the end of the film.
Reasons to be Cheerful
I’m sure this will be a fun project to be a part of. Explosively fun. There’s so much room for every department to shine. I think this has the potential to be a really cinematic film. I think it’s a pretty unique film and there will be plenty of room for creativity in areas you might not usually have the opportunity to explore. We also think that this will be a great project for the departments to really mix well together.
Production
We are thinking of shooting the majority of this in the pentlands. We will either be looking for accommodation there or will be driving back and forth (although not ideal) - this is yet to be decided. We think that this will be really good to film especially with the measures we will have to put in place because of COVID-19. This is especially because most of our shoot will be outdoors.
Crew Still Needed
We’re looking for a production designer. I think it’ll be a lot of fun playing around with merging time periods; this’ll go a long way in establishing the stylised world of the characters. It will also be really fun to work with production design to figure out how we can make the injuries these characters sustain look realistic.
We need an editor who can play around with rhythm in order to build tension throughout a scene.
We’re also looking for a sound designer. We want to build a barran, unforgiving atmosphere that accentuates the characters’ isolation.
Proposal Pitch Video
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