CONTAINER
A Claustrophobic Thriller
A screenplay by Brian Paisley, Keith Digby and Martin de Valk
In development with Creative BC
LOGLINE
When two Marine Patrol officers find a washed-up shipping container on a remote beach, they uncover a nightmare experiment that threatens to destroy their sanity and their lives.
SYNOPSIS
On a remote northern pacific beach, two Marine Patrol officers stop to investigate a mysterious piece of washed-up debris – a full-size shipping container with its rear door open and a woman (Nicole, 40’s) lying wounded and unconscious on the sand nearby.
Troubled veteran Alex Cruz (50’s) and keen trainee Bethany Rice (late 20’s) venture inside the container, only to find two horrific, emaciated corpses, one wrapped like a mummy, the other with skin flaking off and eyes bulging. But before the two officers can return to their boat to report their findings, the container door shuts, locking them inside.
Lights flicker on, and Cruz and Rice cautiously explore the hi-tech innards of what looks like some sort of laboratory and living quarters. They discover laptops used as personal diaries by three healthy men in their 60’s: Jon, Kyle and Trevor. Their diaries reveal them to be part of a medical ‘study’ being conducted by Nicole, under the auspices of an international pharmaceutical corporation.
But what kind of ‘study’ is it? Jon’s laptop diary reveals he’s getting quite sick with the drugs being administered to him; Trevor seems okay, but wary of the study’s purpose; and Kyle is the most skeptical, so much so he has smuggled in a tiny camera to document their interactions with Nicole and the alarming changes in their physical conditions.
Cruz and Rice find the camera, and watch in horror as a gruesome story unfolds. Jon and Kyle fall victim to an unknown degenerative disease, while Trevor seems to grow healthier every time he appears on screen. When Crux begins to suffer like Jon and Kyle, Rice knows they have to get out of the container ASAP. On the monitor, she witnesses tempers flaring, and the effects of a sudden storm at sea – explaining the two deaths and how the container ended up on this beach, but not what was really going on inside.
Cruz believes Nicole is back inside, hiding Trevor somewhere - in a compartment they have yet to find. As he rapidly deteriorates, he and Rice search, and discover the container is longer than it appears. Facing what seems an end wall, they manage to lure Nicole out into the open. But she wields a gun, and in the hidden lab behind her, Rice finds Trevor, transformed by the experiment into a terrifying mockery of a human being.
In a final, bloody confrontation, Cruz wrestles with his personal demons as he and Rice struggle to defeat Nicole’s plans and the corporation’s determination to destroy all evidence of their secret experiment - and those who know about it. Unfortunately, only one person will make it out of this container alive…