Break, Ben's Project : Movies : Amazon Studios

Break

Kind of a modern look at the Gaslight concept. John is a struggling artist who finds himself caught up in a murder investigation where he is the prime suspect. Even worse he comes to believe that he may have committed the murder in some sort of altered state.

Synopsis: We see a man rifling through boxes, frantically searching for something. He races through a house and finds his keys. He bolts out the door and towards his car. But from inside we see a hand on the steering wheel, waiting for him. The man stops cold and slowly backs away.

Jumping back in time to the beginning of the week, John, a struggling artist and aspiring filmmaker, turns in his latest assignment to the producer he contracts with only to find out that there is no more work. Battling depression, John can't connect with his roommates and his relationship with his girlfriend becomes strained.

Strange things begin happening around John's home. There is evidence that John is blacking out and he has no memory of things he's apparently doing.

When John's producer turns up murdered, his hand severed off and used to access a biometric secured bank account, the police find a number of clues that all point back toward John. As the stress builds John begins to wonder if he could have in fact committed the murder. As more strange things continue to happen, John begins to hide notes around the house, noted which receive replies, possibly from John's altered state.

As the police narrow in on John, the evidence piles up both to the police and to John that he committed this crime. Becoming convinced he did it and that his alter ego is out to get him, John flees the house only to find Nile's severed hand on the steering wheel of his car. John retreats back to the house.

It's at this point that a friend of John's stops by and John confesses that he believes he has committed murder. The two struggle over telling the police and the friend takes a tumble that splits open his head.

John passes out and wakes to find one of his two roommates upset about the death of their friend. The roommate seems to confess that he and his brother set John up and have been using him as a patsy, but John's perception is clearly breaking down and it's ambitious weather John is imagining this conversation or if it is real. The two roommates try to subdue and even kill John but with the help of the police, John makes it out alive.

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Creative Notes:

This script is a bit short. I'd like to have the characters flushed out a bit more. I've toyed with the idea of making the roommates music or movie buffs that make a lot of geeky references to things through out the movie. Also the ending is supposed to be ambiguous as to weather or not John committed the initial murder. But I think it's too loaded toward him being crazy.