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Script
A man who sees patterns in government forms wins a small-town mayoral election by 43 votes—and discovers that the thing killing his town isn't hidden in documents. It's under the foundations.
The screenplay is complete. We're seeking co-production partners who understand that the most terrifying horror films are the ones where the monster is procedure.
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The Story
Gil Padilla's mother Rosa was three years old when the Trinity bomb went off sixty miles from her home. Nobody told her family to evacuate. She grew up, got sick, and spent twenty years trying to get the government to acknowledge what it did to her. Four times she applied for compensation. Four times she was denied. She died filling out her fifth application. Her case number was 1638.
Gil inherited her case file and her obsession. He ran a podcast about government cover-ups that went viral—and destroyed his family. His daughter Destiny stopped speaking to him. Now he lives alone in a trailer, walls covered with documents and red string, convinced that patterns hide everywhere.
When a freak thunderstorm suppresses turnout in a special election, Gil wins the mayorship of Aguaverde, New Mexico with 43 votes. On his first day, he requests water quality records. What he finds is a twelve-year paper trail: $180,000 in payments to Rayborn Energy for repairs no one can verify were completed. And Rayborn's real business is injection wells—triggering earthquakes and leaking radioactive isotopes into the aquifer.
The conspiracy is real. But the film asks a harder question: What happens when proving the truth costs you everything—your daughter, your credibility, your place in the world—and still isn't enough to fix anything? This isn't a whistleblower drama. It's institutional horror. The monster isn't a villain. The monster is procedure.
The Characters
The Mayor · 50s
A conspiracy podcaster who won with 43 votes. He's not crazy. He's grieving in a way that looks like madness. The pattern isn't paranoia—it's the shape of his mother's death.
Gil's Daughter · Late 20s
A clinic nurse who changed her last name. She comes back because home is home, even when home is complicated. By the end, she believes him—and that's why she leaves. "I believe you, Dad. That's why I'm leaving."
Council President · 50s
Not a villain. His wife is dying; Rayborn's insurance pays for her treatment. At his resignation, his mouth opens—something true forming—then he sees the Rayborn logo. Mouth closes. Trained swallowing as thesis.
Oak Street Resident · 50s
Her basement crack runs floor to ceiling. She's tired of being polite. She wants someone to look. The jug of brown water is hers.
Deep Dive
The screenplay, structured for quick RECALL—story beats with Director's Intent callouts.
Five minutes. Three acts. One transmission.
Reviewing a screenplay takes time. Might we suggest a Mesa Swirl™?
Desert Freeze™ — Aguaverde's favorite since 1974
Desert Freeze™ and Mesa Swirl™ are fictional brands created for the world of RECALL.
Visual Modes: Mode A — Obsession + Mode B — Institutional. Two incompatible realities: Gil's focused darkness versus the town's flat fluorescent indifference. The audience is trained to look the way Gil looks—slowly, deliberately, for what's hiding in plain sight.
Darkness. A lamp clicks on. Gil's trailer becomes a study: an altar of paperwork. The wall isn't "movie crazy"—it's organized grief made visible: forms, clippings, permits, and dates, all orbiting one number.
At the center: Rosa Elena Padilla's denial letter—CASE #1638—framed under cracked glass. On a shelf: a Geiger counter labeled ROSA. Gil touches the fracture like a wound. He measures the baseline with a worn ruler, writes "16.38 miles," and starts an equation he can't finish yet: 1638 ÷ 43 =
A faint tremor. Barely perceptible. A pushpin snaps loose and an index card slides off. Gil re-pins it without expression. The earth responds before the system does.
In the council chamber, under buzzing fluorescents, Wade Sutter announces the result from a thunderstorm election: forty-three votes. On Town Manager Sandra Walsh's legal pad: 42. Dolores Vega knits in the back row, watching more than the ceremony. Her eyes find Sandra's legal pad. Then Gil. Then back to her needles. She's smiling. Slightly.
Gil's first request as mayor isn't a ribbon-cutting. It's water-quality records. Injection wells. Oak Street. He wrote five rules for himself: Don't mention 1-6-3-8. Don't mention the podcast. Don't mention Mom. Be boring. Win by being boring. He can't follow any of them.
The investigation builds. Gil finds Elena Marsh on Oak Street—a woman who's been documenting for years while nobody looked. Her basement tells the story: a crack runs clean through foundation and drywall. Daylight visible through the split. Elena isn't hysterical. She's tired. Now Gil looks.
The quakes are small but increasing—numbers stacking like invoices. Gil tears down his own wall and rebuilds it. The compulsion is the horror. He can't stop looking.
At Desert Freeze, under the "Home of the Mesa Swirl!" sign, Gil meets Destiny. She's in scrubs, arms crossed. He's got the binder. A melting sundae sits between them—he's not eating. She tells him to stop. The pattern is destroying him. He can't hear her.
Outside First State Bank, Gil crouches on worn granite steps with a tape measure. Destiny stands behind him, arms crossed, watching passersby watch her father. Golden hour makes it beautiful—and humiliating. He's looking at the steps. She's looking at him. The crack in the concrete is hairline, ordinary—the kind of thing you'd never notice unless you were looking.
Then the quake that matters: magnitude 4.1 at 4:16 AM. Back at the trailer, the 4.1 shakes the wall apart—papers flutter, pins pop, the altar wounded. Gil catches Rosa's photograph as everything comes loose.
Cut to black on a question the town refuses to ask: what's under the cracks?
Visual Mode: Documentary light takes over. The investigation leaves Gil's lamp-lit wall and enters harsh New Mexico daylight—where evidence can't hide, only spread.
Morning after the 4.1. Emergency session. The council chamber is packed—standing room only. Gil uses procedure like a lever, spreading invoices across the dais. Elena places a jug of brown water where everyone has to look at it.
Wade calls it an oversight. Gil doesn't argue theory—he argues arithmetic. One invoice: $16,380. Another: $32,760. Another: $49,140. Another: $81,900. Four invoices. Four denials. A unit price dressed up as paperwork. And then Gil speaks: "4:16 and 38 seconds." Wade doesn't understand. Gil does. 1638 embedded in the timestamp of the quake itself.
Elena introduces herself and says her address out loud: 1638 Oak Street. It lands in the room like a normal detail. It lands in Gil like a bell. The pattern isn't hidden. It's printed on mailboxes and forms.
The council votes 3–2 to commission an independent audit. Town Manager Sandra Walsh tells Gil, quietly: an audit gives them subpoena power. The system finally has to pull its own records.
In his office, Gil pins the new evidence to a corkboard. The pattern emerges from municipal paper—permits, invoices, inspection reports. $16,380.00. PERMIT #2024-1638. The numbers repeat like a heartbeat.
Tommy Benavides works the counter at Desert Freeze. He knows things. He's scared to say them. The cost of asking questions in a small town is measured in silence.
Tommy leads Gil to a storage unit. Inside: boxes of records that should have been destroyed. Permits. Invoices. The combination to the lock: 42 × 39 = 1638.
Late at night, Destiny sits alone at her kitchen table. Laptop open. USGS data on screen. A glass of water she hasn't touched. Loretta the cat watches from the counter. She's checking her father's claims. She's starting to believe.
Destiny comes to the trailer. She's been researching. She's found something at the clinic—the Rayborn funding. The amount requested was $160,000. They gave $163,800. Nobody questioned free money. But it fits the pattern.
At Wade's house, Caroline stands in her robe, holding insurance papers. Pill bottles on the counter. Wade watches from the doorway. Without the money from Rayborn, none of this—the house, the treatment, the life they've built—survives.
The press conference. Cameras. Questions. The town learns what Gil has been saying all along. The system cracks in public.
Dolores Vega sits at her window, knitting. Always knitting. Her reflection in the glass shows more than she says. She's been watching since the beginning. She knows something.
In Gil's trailer, Dolores finally speaks. She leans in, still knitting. "I changed the vote. Forty-two to forty-three." She wanted him to win. She wanted someone to finally look.
On Gil's wall: a photograph stamped 06/16/38. The format is wrong. The font is off. Someone made this locally, recently. Disinformation or warning? The card beneath reads: 06/16/38 = 1938. The year before Trinity's theoretical origins. The fill sand predates even the official testing era.
Act Two ends with doctrine cards falling like snow—the storm of accountability finally arriving, too late for some, just in time for others.
Visual Mode: Return to the lamp. The investigation is over. What remains is the cost—and the inheritance.
Gil stands alone in his trailer at night. The wall behind him—rebuilt, cleaner and tighter than before. Headlines pinned around the central equation: 1638 ÷ 43 = 38 REMAINDER 4. Four denial letters stamped on the wall. INSUFFICIENT DOCUMENTATION. FURTHER REVIEW REQUIRED. CLAIM DENIED. CLAIM DENIED.
He takes down Rosa's photograph. Holds it. His thumb traces the crack that runs through her face.
When she said the water tasted wrong. When she said she could feel it in her bones. When she showed him the spots on her skin. He told her she was imagining things. He told her she was seeing patterns that weren't there. And then she died. And he started seeing them everywhere.
Four claims. Four denials. "Insufficient documentation." She had documentation. She had everything. She had thirty years of living downwind and a body full of tumors and it wasn't enough. They gave her a number. Filed her away. Case #1638.
"Thirty-eight remainder four. The four was you. Your four denials. I was carrying you in every number and I didn't even know."
Destiny comes to the trailer. She's found something at the clinic—the Rayborn funding. The amount requested was $160,000. They gave $163,800. Nobody questioned free money. But it fits the pattern.
Gil isn't chasing a villain anymore. The pattern has outgrown conspiracy. What he's finding feels worse: a system—self-sustaining, indifferent, and old. Not a plan. Just the way institutions behave when they're built on denial. The same structures repeating. The same forms. The same numbers.
Then Destiny asks the question that changes the ending: the injection wells are recent, but the foundation damage on Oak Street goes back decades. So what's under the foundations?
Fill sand. Every slab and crawlspace along Oak Street—along the baseline—built on cheap sand sold off after the Trinity settling ponds were drained. The wind carried fallout; it settled; they sold it; everyone built on it.
Gil looks down at the floor. "This trailer."
Destiny follows his gaze. The worn linoleum. The floor they're sitting on.
Elena's Geiger readings aren't coming from the wells. They're coming from underneath. The wells cracked the slabs. The cracks let it up.
Destiny leans against him. The first physical contact in months. Apologies don't fix what's broken, but the night allows truth.
Late afternoon. Golden hour light—the same light that fell on the bank steps. Destiny walks toward her apartment building. Keys in hand. A normal day.
She reaches the concrete steps. Four of them. Worn. Ordinary.
She climbs the first step. The second. She stops.
A hairline crack runs across the third step. The edge slightly lower than it should be. Settlement. A quarter inch, maybe less. The kind of thing you'd never notice unless you were looking. The kind of thing her father would notice. The kind of thing she used to train herself not to see. Before tonight. Before the couch. Before the fill sand.
She reaches for her keys. Stops. Pockets them.
She turns away from the entrance and walks back down the steps. She can't go home. Not to this home. Not anymore.
Hold on the steps after she's gone. The crack. The settlement. The ordinary thing that will never be ordinary again. The infection is complete.
Destiny stands near the door. A bag at her feet. The couch where she slept is made—hospital corners, like she was never there. Gil stands by the wall. Not looking at her. Looking at the pattern.
"I called last night. While you were working." Sarah from residency. Chief of pediatrics now. In Denver. There's an opening.
Gil still doesn't turn. "Because of me."
"Because of the water. Because of what's under the houses. Because of what's under my house—the building I was going to make a life in." Beat. "Because you were right."
She picks up her bag. Pulls out a single key. Her apartment key. Sets it on the table.
"I can't go back there. The steps. The cracks. I see them everywhere now." Beat. "That's your inheritance to me."
She leaves. Gil stands alone. The key on the table. The wall behind him.
CUT TO BLACK.
TITLE CARD: THREE WEEKS LATER
The couch is empty. Not "someone just got up" empty. Uninhabited. No blanket. No pillow. Destiny's key on the table. Untouched. A relic.
Gil stands at the wall. It's cleaner now. Stripped to essentials. At the center: the equation. 1638 ÷ 43 = 38 r 4. Rosa's photograph. The cracked glass. The CLAIM DENIED letter. Sandra's 42 crossed out. 43 written above it.
He doesn't add anything. He doesn't remove anything. He just looks.
Then—slowly—his gaze shifts. Toward us. Not fully. A glance. His eyes find the camera.
A pause. The floor seems to shift.
"Did you see it?"
He turns back to the wall. Five seconds. Ten. The camera doesn't stay on the wall. It drifts down—past Gil's boots—past the worn linoleum—through a seam in the floor and into the dark crawlspace beneath the trailer.
Somewhere beneath the trailer: a faint CLICK.
Gil stills. CLICK. He doesn't reach for the Geiger counter. He knows. CLICK. CLICK.
Raw sand. Foundation fill. Ordinary grit. The clicking echoes. Above us: the floor Gil is standing on. The floor Rosa stood on. The floor Destiny slept on before she left.
Wind moves through the crawlspace. Carrying what it carries. Like it always has.
CLICK. CLICK. CLICK.
FADE TO BLACK. The clicking continues under black. Five seconds. Ten. Then silence.
hegot43votes.com
What's under your steps?
The film ends with "What's under your steps?" But the real ending is what happens after.
The audience leaves the theater. They get in their car. They drive home. They walk up their steps—their actual steps—and for one second, they look down.
That's the moment the film becomes real.
Cracks in concrete. Settlement in steps. Numbers on permits. The sound of a Geiger counter. After the credits roll, these don't feel neutral anymore. This is what institutional horror does: it doesn't scare you in the moment. It follows you home.
What's under your steps?
The horror isn't what happened in Aguaverde.
The horror is that Aguaverde is everywhere.
ASPECT RATIO: 1.33:1 (Academy ratio). The boxed frame puts Gil in a coffin from the first shot. No escape. No horizon. The wall fills the frame. The forms fill the frame. The system is the world.
CAMERA: Locked-off. Tripod. Almost no movement. Let the actors move. Let the audience's eyes move. The film should feel like a document. The few handheld moments—Elena's flooded basement, the Oak Street meeting—feel like tremors.
SOUND DESIGN: The Geiger counter click lives beneath the entire film—so quiet it's almost subliminal. Bank steps. Elena's basement. Gil's trailer. By the end, when we hear it clearly, we realize we've been hearing it all along. No score. The sound of paper. The buzz of fluorescent lights. Wind.
COLOR PALETTE: Sodium vapor yellow. Brown water brown. Government beige. Every institution is the same color. Town Hall. The clinic. Rayborn offices. The state building. The audience will stop seeing difference between them. That's the point.
The film operates in two distinct visual modes. OBSESSION: single-source lamp lighting, warm and claustrophobic, Gil's trailer and his wall of evidence. INSTITUTIONAL: flat fluorescent lighting, cold and bureaucratic, council chambers and government offices. These two modes are incompatible realities. The audience learns to read the difference — and to feel the friction when they collide.
Beat One: Destiny leaves. "I believe you, Dad. That's why I'm leaving." She sets her apartment key on the table. She can't go back there. "That's your inheritance to me."
Beat Two: CUT TO BLACK. TITLE CARD: THREE WEEKS LATER. The couch is empty. The key is untouched. Gil is alone with the wall, stripped to essentials. The system continues.
Beat Three: The Geiger counter clicks beneath the floor. Gil doesn't reach for it. He knows. He looks at Rosa's photograph. Says nothing. There's nothing left to say.
Beat Four: The camera descends into the crawlspace. Raw sand. Clicking echoes. FADE TO BLACK. The clicking continues under black for ten seconds. Then silence. Then: WHAT'S UNDER YOUR STEPS?
This sequence is the heart of the film's emotional structure. Destiny learns about the fill sand at Gil's trailer (Scene 55: Destiny's Arrival), then returns home and sees her own steps differently (Scene 56: The Steps). The order matters: it's not mystery → explanation. It's knowledge → infection. She can never unsee what she now knows. That's Gil's curse passing to her.
Everything we've watched — the invoices, the permits, the water tests, the council meetings — was paper. Surface investigation. Gil was digging in documents when the truth was under the floor. The descent into the crawlspace is the moment the film pivots from WHAT THEY HID to WHAT WAS ALWAYS THERE.
Rosa's Geiger counter from Scene 1 pays off here. Her suspicion. His confirmation. The clicks are her voice finally being heard. But Gil is alone when he hears it. Destiny is gone. Victory is real and insufficient. The system continues.
On Gil's wall: a photograph stamped 06/16/38. He studies the date stamp. The format is wrong—it doesn't match any government dating system. The font is off. Like someone created this to be found. "Disinformation. Or a warning. Or a test."
Later examination reveals a watermark: "AGUAVERDE COPY CENTER." Someone made this. Locally. Recently. It's not prophecy—it's provocation. Someone wanted him chasing this number instead of looking elsewhere. By the end, the card beneath it reads: 06/16/38 = 1938. The year before Trinity's theoretical origins. The fill sand predates even the official testing era. The poison has been there since before anyone was counting.
We're not making the version with the montage showing Rayborn shut down. We're not making the version where Wade is arrested on camera. We're not making the version where Elena gets a settlement check and cries with relief. We're not making the version where Destiny comes back at the end and hugs Gil.
We're not making the version with the needle drop over the credits—"This Land Is Your Land" or some Springsteen track about the little guy winning.
We're not making the version that makes the audience feel good about having watched.
We're making the version that makes them go home and look at their basement.
Cukor's A Double Life (1947) ends with Ronald Colman collapsing on stage as Othello, the audience applauding what they think is performance while we know it's death. No montage of police investigation. No coda showing the theater closing. No character turning to explain. Just the image: a man dying in front of people who are clapping.
The seeing IS the work. Cukor trusted the audience.
If RECALL has done its job: the empty couch IS the cost. The key untouched IS the inheritance. The Geiger clicking IS the accusation. The crawlspace IS "what's under your steps." We don't need Gil to say "Did you see it?"—because the audience is already seeing it. The image carries the thesis. The audience does the work.
"The horror isn't that the system is Kafkaesque. The horror is that the system is working exactly as designed."
— Director's Statement
Distribution Strategy
RECALL is positioned for a festival-first release. The goal is not exposure for its own sake but strategic placement: the right premiere establishes the film's identity, attracts the right distribution partners, and creates a narrative that carries through theatrical release and beyond.
We are targeting three festivals, each representing a distinct pathway. The film can only premiere once. These are not backup options—they are alternative strategies based on where the film lands in the submission cycle and which programmers respond to the material.
Target: U.S. Dramatic Competition
Sundance is the American independent film market. A premiere in U.S. Dramatic Competition positions RECALL as the year's essential American indie—the film that defines a moment. This is where A24, Neon, and Focus Features come to acquire. Where critics establish consensus. Where a film becomes a conversation.
RECALL fits the Sundance programming sensibility: formally precise, politically engaged, character-driven but not conventional. The man-who-sees-patterns-becomes-mayor hook is high-concept enough for trade coverage, but the execution is institutional horror—a grief story disguised as a procedural nightmare. Sundance programmers have historically responded to films that weaponize genre conventions against themselves. RECALL looks like a whistleblower drama and plays like a horror film where the monster is procedure.
Comparable Precedents
Zodiac (procedural obsession, unsolvable pattern), First Reformed (slow cinema, environmental despair), Safe (institutional gaslighting), Winter's Bone (regional America, institutional violence). The film's formal discipline—1.33:1 Academy ratio, locked-off camera, minimal score—signals artistic ambition while the subject matter (downwinders, contamination, denial) resonates politically.
Objective: North American distribution deal. Critical establishment as prestige American indie. Platform for awards-season conversation if release timing aligns.
Target: Un Certain Regard
Cannes is the international prestige play. Un Certain Regard programs formally ambitious work that doesn't quite fit the Competition's auteur-driven mandate—exactly where a first feature from new filmmakers belongs. A Cannes selection signals to European buyers, co-production partners, and international press that RECALL operates at the highest level of craft.
The film's visual grammar aligns with what Cannes programmers seek: the 1.33:1 Academy ratio (formal discipline), the locked-off camera (systematic attention to composition), the icon-object approach (the jug, the wall, the cracked photograph). Cannes has always valued cinema that trusts images over exposition. Elena holding brown water is a poster. The Geiger counter clicking under black is an accusation. It needs no explanation.
Strategic Value
Cannes opens doors that Sundance cannot. European co-production financing for Pattern Films' subsequent projects. Access to international sales agents who package films for worldwide distribution. The Marché du Film runs concurrently—buyers from sixty countries attend. A Cannes premiere establishes Pattern Films as a production entity with international ambitions, not a one-film operation.
Objective: International sales. European co-production relationships for future projects. Critical positioning as formally rigorous cinema, not simply "American indie."
Target: Panorama or Forum
Berlin is the political festival. Where Cannes privileges form and Sundance privileges character, Berlin privileges engagement—films that mean something beyond themselves. RECALL's subject matter (environmental contamination, institutional denial, the bureaucratic violence of claim forms and blank verification lines) aligns precisely with Berlin's programming identity. This is the definitive film about bureaucracy as monster—and Berlin understands that language.
The Trinity test resonates differently in Europe. American nuclear history is world history. The downwinders aren't a regional story—they're a template for how governments everywhere manage inconvenient populations. Berlin programmers understand this. The film's central question (what if proving the truth costs you everyone—and still isn't enough?) has obvious European parallels in how institutions handle whistleblowers, how bureaucracy insulates power, how denial becomes procedure.
Timing Advantage
Berlinale runs in February—before Cannes, after Sundance submissions close. If the Sundance cycle doesn't align, Berlin offers a world premiere slot that still positions the film for spring/summer theatrical release. The European Film Market runs concurrently. German broadcasters and distributors attend in force. A Berlin premiere could anchor a German-language territory deal that finances post-production or provides P&A support.
Objective: Political positioning. German/European distribution. Documentary-adjacent credibility that opens doors for hybrid theatrical/educational release.
Festival strategy is not about maximizing exposure—it's about controlling the narrative. A film premieres once. That premiere defines everything that follows: which critics write first reviews, which buyers see the film in what context, what expectations audiences bring to theatrical release.
RECALL will submit to one primary festival based on production timeline and strategic assessment. The premiere establishes identity. Secondary festivals (Toronto, Telluride, New York, London) provide sustained visibility. Theatrical release follows within six months of premiere, while festival momentum holds.
Materials
A man who sees patterns in government forms wins a small-town mayoral election by 43 votes—and discovers that the thing killing his town isn't hidden in documents. It's under the foundations.
The horror isn't what happened in Aguaverde. The horror is that Aguaverde is everywhere.
Primary Materials
Production Materials
Director's Annotated Screenplay. Visual grammar, scene relationships, compositional intent.
Formal constraints and visual rules. Camera, sound, counting, and the fourth wall.
1638
Rosa's case number. The shape of grief. It was here all along.
What's under your steps?
A production company specializing in systematic cinema and character-driven storytelling. Based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, we develop projects that find structure within constraint and meaning within form.
Writer / Producer
Background in systematic research and complex narrative development. Author of The First Fault-Line. Graduate work at UC San Diego and Caltech. She writes films about people who arrive late—to responsibility, to clarity, to courage—and who discover that lateness doesn't disqualify them.
Cinematographer / Producer
50+ years of experience in film and television production. Visual storytelling with emphasis on practical, location-based shooting. His approach: sincerity is static; competence moves. The camera doesn't chase. It observes.
Access to professional sound stages, diverse locations, and the New Mexico film incentive program (25–35% refundable tax credit).