01
Evie's Love
How far would YOU go to save your baby?
Evie, a young, first-time mother obsesses over the safety of her baby. This film looks over the real-life struggles of being a mum and what they go through on a day-to-day basis. As we see Evie's life unfold, things aren't exactly what they seem to be.
​
25-year-old Alex sits in a questioning room within a police station; emotional and overwhelmed, he declares he knows nothing about why his wife ran away. One month earlier, Evie wakes up in bed to the sound of crying of her young baby boy, Danny; Alex sleeps beside her. As the days go on, Evie struggles with her life as a new mother, she begins to isolate herself from the outside world, putting her full attention on the baby; she is seen ignoring calls and lying to her friends about not being able to see them. She obsesses over Danny’s wellbeing and compulsively cleans everything he touches. It becomes obvious that Alex isn’t helpful or supportive with the baby and thinks only about himself, meanwhile criticising what Evie does. In the future, other members of Evie’s social circle are being interviewed about her whereabouts and flashbacks of her encounters with them in the few days prior are shown; she is seen shunning her own mother away after feeling judged by her. After being questioned at the police station about her daughter’s wellbeing before she went missing, Evie’s mother claims her daughter was happy, as do her friends. We then see the side of her life that Evie has been hiding from her friends and family all along.
Script Research
Main Areas of Research
-
Signs of descent into madness
-
Loss of identity
-
Lasting impact physical abuse has on victims
-
The struggles of becoming a new mother
-
Miscarriage
​
SIGNS OF DESCENT INTO MADNESS:
-
Long lasting sadness/irritability
-
Confused thinking
-
Extremely high/low moods
-
Excessive fear/worry/anxiety
-
Social withdrawal
-
Thoughts of suicide
-
Increasing inability to cope with daily problems and activities
-
Denial of obvious problems
THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN (2016)
In this film, Rachel is an alcoholic, and, we find out later, her controlling, narcissistic husband, Tom, had been convincing her that she would lash out and embarrass herself and others while she was drunk, therefore telling her she had done stuff she had not. She starts showing signs of someone who is descending into madness after she witnesses a clue to a crime involving her ex-husband. However, due to her ‘past’ no one believes her and she begins to doubt herself. She carries on drinking heavily, believes she’s worthless, and loses her job. Rachel is basically 2 different characters. Drunk Rachel and Sober Rachel. Sober Rachel is trying her best to help solve the disappearance of Megan, a woman she felt she knew as she seen her every day on her commute to her old job. Drunk Rachel constantly lusts after her ex-husband Tom, who is married to, and has a baby with, Anna, the woman he cheated on Rachel with. However, we, as an audience, see things from Rachel’s point of view, we see her waking up hungover the next day, seeing she’s called Tom hundreds of times during the night, while Tom’s wife Anna is constantly telling Rachel to leave them alone. We later find out that Tom has been playing everyone this whole time, lying about what Rachel was up to when she was drunk, making her feel like she had no control, and lying about Rachel contacting him constantly when he was the one contacting her while she was drunk. Not until the very end of the film do we see Rachel grow as a person, for the first time she is confident in herself, she knows she’s right and she knows exactly who Tom is.
Many of Rachel’s characteristics are like my main character. I want Emma to have that tired and broken-looking personality like Rachel. Similarly, while we like Rachel and feel sorry for her, we are still angry with her for the way we believed she acted when she was drunk, until we discover the real story at the end, Emma will also be a likeable character, but we are angry with her for her selfishness at not letting anyone else spend time with the baby, especially her husband, until we find out that he was abusive to her and she is just protecting her baby from harm. I want the audience to think she’s crazy for no reason, to find out that she does have a reason to be a bit crazy and obsessive over her baby’s protection.
LOSS OF IDENTITY
​
THE HANDMAID’S TALE (2017-)
​
​
In this movie we see Martha, who was brainwashed into joining a religious cult that saw her raped and abused for years. After finally escaping the cult, she calls out to her sister for a safe place to stay. Throughout the film, we see the effects of the abuse and how is has changed her. She is constantly irritable and argues with her sister and her husband when they try and help her turn her life around. She’s incredibly fragile an insecure, she sleeps constantly, doesn’t eat, and has no self-worth; things like being renamed from ‘Martha’ to ‘Marcy May’ by the cult leader gave him full control over her and, in a way, resulted in the complete loss of her individual identity.
I want to transfer some aspects from this to my own film. Although there won’t be a cult involved, I want to touch up on the way that bringing a baby into the world can result in mothers feeling like they’ve been stripped of their individual identity; their main title is now ‘mother’ as opposed to before. Their entire world goes from focusing on themselves to having to centre it around another human in a split second, they are now the second most important person in their life, or so they often feel. Everything Emma does is with her baby in mind, she thinks about him constantly, she holds him constantly, it is her job to stop him crying, to feed him, to change him etc. I want to explore that loss of identity in new mothers.
​
​
LASTING IMPACT PHYSICAL ABUSE HAS ON VICTIMS
I, Tonya (2017)
​
In I, Tonya, we see the story of the infamous attack on Nancy Kerrigan, a former U.S Olympic figure skater, from the point of view of Tonya Harding, who was competing with her; Harding was allegedly involved in the attack. The film looks over Harding’s entire life, beginning with childhood. Hardy’s defense was that the attack was pinned on her due to her lower-class upbringing, making her a very unlikely figure skater. The film spends a lot of time focusing on the abuse Hardy suffered throughout her life, especially from her husband. The way domestic abuse is portrayed in this film is far from what I plan on including in my film, but I wanted to explore different ways domestic abuse is portrayed in film, and the different ways people deal with it.
​
The Colour Purple (1985)
​
Sleeping With The Enemy (1991)
The Struggles of Becoming a New Mother
​
-
Mum-shaming
-
Struggles with breastfeeding
-
Social media pressures
-
Exhaustion through lack of sleep
-
Not bonding with baby
-
Post-natal depression
-
Obsessive fear of something happening to baby
-
Heightened emotions
​
The Cry (2018)
The Cry is a BBC mini-series telling the story of new-mother, Joanna, and the struggles she faces connecting with her baby; as the story continues, Joanna’s baby suspiciously goes missing. Joanna and husband Alastair appeal to the public to help find their missing baby. As the story continues we find out that baby Noah died while in the car with his parents after Joanna accidently gave him her medication instead of his own, resulting in them finding him dead in his car seat. There’s another twist in the final episode where we find out that Alastair was responsible for giving Noah the wrong medication resulting in his death, not Joanna, who he had convinced must have done it as she was so exhausted from the young baby. Alastair had manipulated Joanna and made her believe she was responsible for the death of her own baby.
I found the idea of making the mother look responsible, but later finding out that through subtle manipulation from her partner, hinted throughout the series, that the blame shifts and we completely sympathize with Joanna, and aren’t angry when we find out she is then responsible for the death of Alastair, after running their car off the road after she unclicks his seatbelt. Throughout this series, we discover that Alistair has been ‘gaslighting’ Joanna (physiologically manipulating her by making her question her own sanity, like the character of Rachel in ‘The Girl on the Train’). We know from Alistair’s past, through flashbacks, that he is a liar. His relationship with Joanna began on a lie, after claiming he was single, we, along with Joanna, discover that he has a wife and daughter and had been having an affair. Alistair’s first wife, Alex, leaves him, and takes her daughter from where they live in Scotland, back Australia, her place of birth. For some reason, Joanna stays with Alastair and they build a life together, getting married and having baby Noah. So, we have already seen how much of a convincing liar Alastair is and how capable he is of making someone believe a lie. This is the reality of a many relationships. Abusing someone using anger, either physical or verbal is a very different form of abuse to this, although it is still abuse. Gaslighting is, terrifyingly, difficult to see when you are the one being gaslighted, it’s very clever and subtle that people often don’t realize it’s even happening to them.
We also get the feeling throughout the series that, while Alistair appears to be helpful at times, Joanna is bearing 99% of the pressure of being a new parent. An example of this is when they’re on the flight from Scotland to Australia; Noah screams and cries and won’t settle the entire journey, driving Joanna insane, while Alistair sleeps peacefully beside her, for some unknown reason he doesn’t wake up and offer to help until near the end of the flight, which seems quite unrealistic as no one else on the plane was able to sleep due to the crying. However, when he finally does wake up, he offers to take the baby and acts like he’s really helping Joanna, making her think he’s wonderful, while he should have been helping her much more. Another theme I want to take from this series is the difficult nature of being a new-mother. In the first episode, we see the constant struggles Joanna faces as a new mother. Noah cries constantly when he’s with her, resulting in them failing to bond, and Joanna doubting her abilities as a mother. We see people judging her in the street when they see Noah crying, telling her to ‘try feeding him’ or he’s ‘too cold’ or ‘too hot’ when that isn’t the case, believing she’s neglecting her child when she’s doing everything in her power to console him. She’s constantly exhausted, and watching the baby cry endlessly, the audience is exhausted and sympathizes with Joanna, seeing she’s doing everything she can to console Noah. This show also highlights mothers how suffer with post-natal depression in silence. I want my film to raise awareness over this and allow mothers to know that it is extremely common to go through post-natal depression in all forms, but that you should seek help and to break the stigma behind admitting you’re not okay after having a baby. We discover that Joanna isolates herself from friends and family, she is even hostile towards her best friend, who we see her meet up with for a coffee.
​
Tully (2018)
Miscarriage
​
The Help (2011)
The Help follows many different story lines, the one I’m focusing on in terms of research is the story of Celia Foote, a wealthy, yet out of place to the other women in the story and is isolated from being friends with them. Celia is very different to the other white women in the film, she is a sharp contrast to characters like Hilly and Elizabeth, who treat their ‘help’ appallingly. After Minny is fired from the home of Hilly, she seeks a job from Celia who welcomes her with open arms, and treats her as her equal, rather than her slave. The two develop a beautiful friendship throughout the story. Along the way, we find out that Celia and her husband are silently struggling to conceive a baby and she suffers many miscarriages. She punishes herself for not being able to bear her husband’s baby and thinks she is letting him down, worrying she’s not good enough if she can’t become a mother, she worries he will leave her. Minny is the only person who knows about Celia’s struggles to conceive, she doesn’t even discuss it with her husband. Celia’s husband Johnny isn’t even aware Minny is working for them; Celia wants Minny to teach her how to be a housewife as she can’t clean or cook or provide for her husband at home. Near the end of the story Johnny has found out about Minny, he waits at the front of the house for her to arrive. When Minny spots Johnny she runs away, fearing he will be angry that she has been secretly working there. Johnny shows nothing but respect for Minnie and invites her into their home to thank her for helping his wife and helping her deal with her struggles to conceive.
In this book, turned movies, turned TV series, The Handmaid’s Tale is set in the dystopian universe of Gilead. It explores themes of women in subjugation in a patriarchal society and the various ways these women attempt to gain individualism and independence. This film is very much about the identity of these women being taken away, and becoming property of the ‘commanders’; hence the name of our female protagonist ‘Offred’ which translates as ‘Of Fred’, meaning she belongs to a man named Fred, who is her ‘commander’. The strip the handmaid’s of their names, pull them away from their families and all contact is lost, they are forced to dress a certain way and talk a certain way. They are fully under the control of the totalitarian government of Gilead. Their only purposes are, as Offred describes it, as a ‘two-legged womb’; the Handmaid’s must bear the children of the commanders.
Again, what I want to take from this is that loss of identity, and the control and power men have over women that is still very present in society today. While the book ends on a cliffhanger, the TV series carries on the story (written by the original author). We see Offred have a baby, which triggers her need to escape this world she and her baby are trapped in, it’s a fight for survival. In my story, Emma finally decides to escape from her home with her baby, because she’s so scared of the potential abuse her baby could receive at the hands of her husband, in the same way Offred plans to escape Gilead.
​