Space Reserved

Synopsis

CLOSE ON a young man’s face, eyes closed. SCOTT LARIMER's eyes suddenly blink wide open. He is attractive, late twenties. PULL BACK to reveal blood matted in his wet hair and trickling down his temples. He gasps in panic and whips his head to look around but a flash of pain arrests his motion. He holds still and moves his head tentatively, looking from the corners of his eyes.

He discovers he is lying on a bloodstained unsheeted mattress, tied firmly to a bed framework by a collection of clothesline, yarn, and torn cloth in an incongruously cheery, colorful print. A bra binds his bare feet together.

It’s early morning; the walls are grayish green; sickly daylight barely emerges through dirty Venetian blinds revealing his pasty, bruised face. Even the blood on the pillow looks pale.

Horror erupts as Scott realizes he is a crime victim. As his eyes accustom to the light, he sees on a filthy pillow a yellow post-it note that says "sorry" with a winking smiley face.

In VOICEOVER, he tries to explore how he got there, searching his memory. Suddenly, he turns and vomits on the floor. The door opens instantly and JASMINE COYNE a pretty, shapely woman, late twenties, enters with a pan, towels and cleanup spray.

"Don't you just hate when that happens?" She says cheerily. She cleans up the vomit, then gently wipes blood from his face. "Don't worry, I'm a nurse,” (Everyone lies in this script)

"What happened to me?" He pleads.

"Uh-oh" says Jasmine ."Retrograde amnesia from the concussion. It'll all come back to you.” He watches her silently.

We learn through flashback that he is the creative director at a boutique high-tech ad agency. Feeling pumped after a successful pitch, he had taken pretty client rep ANNE GUSTAFSON to dinner. Searching for parking at her condo, Scott thoughtlessly pulls into a 'space reserved' for somebody else to showhis rule-breaking bravado.

In Anne's flat, their attraction ended in lovemaking. Scott awakened at 3 a.m. and sneaked out. He’s that kind of guy. We begin to form a picture of a brash, mischievous, clever, talented man with a defective conscience.

When he arrives in the garage, he found his tires deflated and a nasty note on his car: “Sic Semper Assholes.” His phone is unaccountably drained; he has no pump. Unwilling to slink back and wake up Anne, he had decided to confront the owner of the space and charm them into lending him their phone. Even though it’s now 3:30 a.m.

OUTSIDE the condo in the DARK, nobody responds to his knock. He looks in the window and sees a phone on the coffee table in the living room. Scott knocks louder and the door falls open a tiny crack. Against all good sense, he advances silently into the darkness.

Suddenly, young ALLISON VANDERVEER appears, in silky underwear, terrified, and begins to plead for her life. Scott tries to explain he only wanted the phone. He tries to back out but wherever he goes, she is there blocking him. She offers him sex if he will spare her life and then winds herself sinuously around him. She is impervious to his explanations. They end up entangled on the floor. Allison calls for help.

JASMINE enters. She admits deflating his tires as a joke. While she is talking, Allison opens a drawer and takes out a gun. All three are frozen. Allison tells him he is under citizens arrest for breaking and entering, and she is calling the police.

“Go ahead!” Scott shouts.

But instead she makes him take out his wallet, which the women look through. They are filled with contempt at his upscale cards and phone. Apparently, he is the kind of man they love to hate. They tease him about his job, his looks, his education.

Scott has had enough. He makes a break for the door; there is a struggle and the gun clicks empty. Jasmine clubs him unconscious with an exercise weight.

TIME PASSiNG

The women take care of Scott, feeding and bathing him, treating his wound. Jasmine is sympathetic but Allison hates him and both blame men like him for abuse, betrayal, etc. as the facts of their shattered lives emerge. As days pass, alliances form, and boundaries blur. They bombard Scott with all their resentment. But they're funny too. Sometimes they show unexpected sympathy.

The women give him strange pills, supposedly for the pain in his head; he gets delirious and stoned. The atmosphere is warped and scary. The kitchen is grubby, with dishes in the sink.

They charge his phone and tell him they have hidden his car. His phone mail reveals that people at work have moved on without him on his projects. He has a habit of taking off to “depressurize” on impromptu holidays. We learn that Scott is actually isolated and estranged from others—and from his family. He seems likeable and successful on the outside, but something is wrong with him. The women seem to know it. they keep pushing him to "get honest."

When his date, Anne, shows up at the door, Scott thinks he is saved. But Anne turns out to be the mastermind of the hostage taking. He realizes it had been her idea for him to park in the reserved space.

Anne brings them food, drugs, and lots of liquor. They don’t know quite what to do with Scott at this point, but in the meantime, they talk about their lives and relationships, mostly disastrous.

But why? Why me? Scott asks Anne. They are stoned and drunk, playing Truth or Dare.

Now, Anne reminds Scott of an incident in grammar school. Scott and a gang of his buddies had lured 'Terri'--- the class’s prettiest girl --- to a remote area of the playground and taken her hostage. Just a prank! Scott insists. Now Anne tells him she was that girl. She was Terri.

“We had a crush on you, that’s all.” But Scott now recalls that Terri /Anne was raped. She cannot remember whether Scott raped her. He swears his innocence. "We loved you. We didn’t mean to hurt you. We lost control."

They had torn off her clothes and played with her like a cat with a mouse, letting her almost get away before they outrun and capture her, bringing her back and “punishing” her.

The boys debate whether to strangle her and leave her on the playground. They all swear a “blood oath” of secrecy. They are only about 11 and think nobody would suspect them. They are naïve about DNA and forensics. At last the boys tire of tormenting her. They settle for threatening to kill her sister if she tells on them, and they finally let her go. Traumatized, Terri keeps the secret.

Her family eventually moves away and the boys go on with their lives. Scott graduates with honors and gets into an Ivy League college, as do the other boys. They excel in sports and academics, travel and enjoy their youth, get great jobs. They have suppressed the memory of their “joke.”

But Terri/Anne reveals that her life was shattered by the rape; she became addicted, self-destructive, and suicidal. When she met Allison and Jasmine in a mental hospital, they plotted revenge on Scott—the ringleader. Still beautiful, Anne gets a job and pulls herself together, living to avenge her lost youth. Now Scott wonders: is he really that monster? The women don't know how to get out of this situation and debate killing him and dumping him and his car in a remote area.

Tied to the bed and bruised after an unsuccessful escape attempt, Scott begins to hallucinate. He sees visions from his trip to the prehistoric caves at Altamira, Spain as an undergraduate. He remembers how he had once planned to become an anthropologist, and the caves had had a deep effect on him. He draws strength from the image of a Palaeolithic shaman, a hallucination who visits him and helps him connect with and own his primal urges. He counsels him on how to face down death without fear and gather the strength to save his own life.

Scott reconnects with his dark side. He manipulates Jasmine into lovemaking and then chokes her unconscious. As he tries to escape from the two-story window, Allison pushes him and he falls to the pavement. He hears sirens and all goes black.

The police, confronted with wildly differing stories, eventually drop all charges. But Scott can't rest. In the dark, we see him pull into a ‘reserved’ space and knock at a door. Jasmine answers. We realize that this may not be the first time he has compulsively reenacted his captivity. He is a prisoner of his own obsession.