Feature screenplay · Reading sample
The Son of No One
9-page opening sample. Full screenplay available privately on request.
Sample text is displayed for reading only. No public PDF download is provided.
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2
FADE IN ON BLACK.
A fluorescent HUM. Water somewhere inside a wall. A
building awake after everyone has gone home.
1994.
INT. HOTEL CORRIDOR - SURVEILLANCE FOOTAGE - NIGHT (1994)
Interlaced black-and-white. Timecode: 02:11:46. A long
corridor, too symmetrical to feel accidental. Doors repeat
into distance.
A YOUNG MAN (19) enters frame in a wet coat. He carries a
small cake in a clear plastic box. The icing has slid to
one side.
He walks the corridor without checking the numbers. Stops
at ROOM 507. In his free hand, a letter. One line visible
through the fold:
COME ALONE. I WANT TO SEE WHAT YOU BECAME.
He does not knock. He waits. The door opens. Whoever opens
it remains outside the camera's angle. Warm light reaches
across the blue corridor.
The Young Man looks down at the cake, embarrassed by it.
YOUNG MAN
I didn't know what fathers like.
A hand enters frame. Older. Steady. It straightens the
Young Man's collar. The Young Man smiles. A child's smile
on an adult face. He enters. The door closes.
The timecode jumps: 02:11 becomes 04:53.
The corridor is unchanged. Room 507 stays closed. No one
has come out. Over the camera microphone, very faint: WATER
RUNNING. Then it stops.
The silence after it is worse.
CUT TO BLACK.2
3
TITLE: THE SON OF NO ONE
PRESENT DAY.
INT. POLICE HEADQUARTERS - SUB-BASEMENT ARCHIVE - NIGHT
Green fluorescent light. Kilometres of shelving. A burst
pipe has wept down one wall; the stain has the shape of a
country that no longer exists.
Cardboard boxes stand open on trestle tables. Their
contents dry on lines like laundry: photographs, index
cards, confessions.
VIKTOR MAREN (43) works alone among them. Immaculate in a
wet building. He peels two soaked index cards apart with
tweezers, unhurried, precise - a surgeon for paper.
He aligns a drying photograph with the table edge. Adjusts
it two millimetres.
Now it is correct.
A uniformed TECHNICIAN (20s) wheels in another trolley of
ruined boxes.
TECHNICIAN
They said throw out anything the
water got. Nobody's coming for
this stuff.
Viktor does not look up.
VIKTOR
Somebody came for all of it. Once.
The Technician waits for more. There is no more.
TECHNICIAN
Happy birthday, Inspector.
Viktor looks at him now.
VIKTOR
It is a date of entry. Not an
achievement.3
4
TECHNICIAN
Still. Forty-three sounds
expensive.
He leaves. Viktor listens until the trolley wheels
disappear. Two index cards have dissolved into each other.
He separates them. Beneath: four thin files fused by water
into one brick.
Four year stamps: 1994. 2003. 2011. 2019. Viktor lays them
side by side. Aligns their edges.
INT. VIKTOR'S APARTMENT - NIGHT
A room like a sentence with no adjectives. White walls. One
chair. One lamp. One glass. Nothing on the walls. Nothing
out of place. It is not minimalism. It is absence,
maintained.
Viktor eats standing at the counter from one plate. Washes
it immediately. Dries it. Returns it to a cupboard
containing three plates.
He opens the bathroom cabinet. Toothbrush. Razor.
Painkillers. All squared to their shelves.
In the mirror he examines his own face as if checking it
against an instruction he cannot remember receiving.
Outside, rain needles the window. The refrigerator HUMS.
The city does not sleep; it waits.
INT. ARCHIVE - VIKTOR'S DESK - DAY
Daylight does not reach here. Day is a paler green. The
four files, dry now, lie open in chronological order.
FILE ONE - 1994. The YOUNG MAN from Room 507. Nineteen.
Viktor's face, decades younger - too exact until the
framing is noticed: same lens height, same trained posture,
same refusal to smile.
FILE TWO - 2003. PETER NOLL, 24. Different hair. Different
decade. Same mouth.4
5
FILE THREE - 2011. ROMAN DANEK, 31. Factory identification
photograph. Same brow. Same small asymmetry at the left
eye.
FILE FOUR - 2019. ANDREI VESS, 37. Passport photograph. The
resemblance is now impossible to dismiss. Viktor holds
Andrei's photograph toward the dark glass of the records
office.
His reflection appears beside it. Not the same man. The
same design, six years apart.
He lowers the photograph.
Four case-closure forms. Four different decades of paper.
One identical signature.
ROTH.
The signature is confident, administrative, unchanged by
thirty years.
INT. POLICE HEADQUARTERS - ROTH'S OFFICE - DAY
An office at the exact temperature of a pension. Framed
commendations, none recent. ROTH (64) sits behind a desk
with the four files between them. That is the detail: he
has not opened them.
ROTH
You know what this department is
for, Maren?
VIKTOR
Unresolved crimes.
ROTH
Storage. We are storage. Things go
in.
Roth squares the files with two fingers. The gesture lands
badly on Viktor.
ROTH
Four missing adults. No bodies. No
families pressing. No press.
Closed by procedure.5
6
VIKTOR
All by you.
ROTH
I signed a lot of paper.
VIKTOR
This paper has the same sentence
four times.
ROTH
Voluntary disappearance. No
evidence of crime.
VIKTOR
Four men with the same face.
Roth looks at him. Not at the photographs.
ROTH
People resemble people.
VIKTOR
Do they resemble me?
A beat.
ROTH
You look tired.
Roth slides the files back, but keeps two fingers on them
half a second too long.
ROTH
These cases are closed. That's not
a decision. It's a fact. Like
weather.
VIKTOR
Weather changes.
ROTH
Not in this building.
Viktor stands.6
7
ROTH
Take a holiday. You've never taken
one. It's in your file.
VIKTOR
I'll requisition the storage lists
first. Flood damage.
A beat. Both understand what has just been agreed to, and
that it is not a holiday.
INT. ARCHIVE - PHOTOCOPIER ALCOVE - NIGHT
The copier light sweeps like a searchlight under the lid.
Page after page.
Viktor copies all four files, complete.
On the glass, face down, the 1994 photograph. The light
passes across it. For a moment the young man's face glows
through the paper - a face developing in the dark.
Viktor takes the copies. Returns the originals to their
boxes. Aligns the boxes.
The first transgression, filed correctly.
INT. CIVIL REGISTRY - DAY
Green walls. A queue that has stopped believing in
movement. An OLD CLERK (70s) turns pages with a rubber
thimble.
Viktor's police card lies in the tray. She has Andrei's
birth record open. Looks from the record to Viktor. From
Viktor to the record.
CLERK
Relative?
VIKTOR
No.
She looks once more. Decides not to say what she is
thinking. Rotates the ledger toward him.
FATHER: -7
8
Mother: a name. Beside it: DECEASED 1998. The dash is
clean, official, almost elegant.
CLERK
We had a term for these, in my
day. Unofficial.
She closes the ledger softly.
CLERK
Son of no one.
Viktor does not move.
VIKTOR
How many records have the dash?
CLERK
Now? None. It isn't allowed now.
(beat)
Then? As many as were needed.
Viktor slides Andrei's photograph under the glass.
VIKTOR
Can you locate the original
registration?
CLERK
You are authorization number?
Viktor gives one from memory. She checks. It belongs to a
flood-damage inventory, not a kinship search. She knows. He
knows she knows.
The Clerk opens another ledger anyway.
EXT. FORMER TOBACCO WAREHOUSE - RESTORATION SITE - EVENING
Blue hour. Rain has just ended. Scaffolding drips. A
brutalist warehouse half-swallowed by restoration mesh
glows from within like a lantern with something moving in
it.8
9
ELENA VESS (34) stands on a first-floor platform comparing
the facade to a 1968 photograph. Work boots, black coat,
pencil behind one ear. She thinks in load-bearing walls.
Footsteps below.
ELENA
Site's closed. Come back when it's
beautiful.
VIKTOR
Elena Vess? Police.
The word lands somewhere old in her. She turns.
Stops completely.
The photograph in her hand tilts. She does not notice.
Viktor stands below in work light, looking up.
Elena is not looking at a stranger. She is doing arithmetic
- adding six years to a face she has grieved for seven.
ELENA
No.
VIKTOR
No what?
ELENA
Whatever this is. No.
She starts down the scaffold.
VIKTOR
I'm reopening Andrei's file.
That stops her again.
INT. FORMER TOBACCO WAREHOUSE - SITE OFFICE - NIGHT
A room of drawings: sections, elevations, bones pinned to
every wall. One electric heater. Two chairs that have never
faced each other until now.
The 2019 file lies between them. Elena has not touched it.
She watches Viktor instead.9
10
ELENA
Seven years. Nobody came. I called
for two of them, then I stopped.
Do you know what they told me the
last time?
VIKTOR
Adults have the right to
disappear.
ELENA
Word for word.
(beat)
Ask me what's not in it.
Viktor opens his notebook. Does not write. Elena sees that
it is partly for her benefit.
VIKTOR
The weeks before. What changed?
ELENA
He got a letter.
The heater ticks. Viktor's stillness changes quality.
ELENA
No return address. Handwritten. He
wouldn't show me. For a week he
was polite. Andrei was many
things. Polite wasn't one of them.
(beat)
The night before he left, I woke
up and he was at the window. He
said, "He found me." I asked who.
She stops. Not for effect. Because saying it makes it true
again.
ELENA
"My father." Andrei grew up in the
homes. There was no father. There
was a dash.
Silence. The building drips somewhere, patiently.End of sample.Full screenplay available on request.