Coffee by Chilion Radeal Thomas - Short, Thriller - A chance encounter at a coffee shop turns deadly when a headstrong young woman, meets a young man with a troubled past. 12 pages

Production: 2 characters, 1 location - pdf format

Writer interested in feedback on this work

Hi Chilion, welcome to SS.

First admission: I read your logline and genre in a cursory manner then completely forgot what it was as I was reading the script because...

The tone of this reads as a lighthearted meet-cute RomCom, but turns sinister in the very last frame. A real 'what the...' moment for me cause tone and action makes an abrupt one-eighty and appears quite out of the blue (with no sinister tone in the lead up,) to turn deadly at the end. It shocked me in the final scene cause the lead in is bright breezy philosophical  banter.

Quite a few grammar & punctuation errors which I will provide if you make an appearance.

If I were you I'd tweak some dialogue, tweak the ending, and revise this as RomCom.

Alternately, if you're really stuck on Horror/Thriller you need a darker tone throughout with some indication in action that Xavier is in fact an off kilter psychopath.

Re your logline - A chance encounter at a coffee shop turns deadly when a headstrong young woman, meets a young man with a troubled past.

Delete the comma. It's not needed.  And there's really no indication of Xavier's troubled past except in this 'telling' line at the start, which in no way will come across in an actual visual onscreen:

He stares at the girl for a moment,then stops himself not
wanting to risk what happened last time,the mere thought
causing him pain.
He finds himself staring again, debating on what he should
say but looks away again.

Jmho.

Hope you make an appearance on the discussion boards.

Hey Chillion,

Gave this a quick read and I've many of the same sentiments as LC. The logline faded quickly and was forgotten by the end of page one. Your varied tense, spelling, and punctuation was very distracting but forgivable as I'm betting this to be a very early draft and that you're somewhat new to writing.

One issue is that Shay is not introduced prior to her dialogue. Give us an intro (age, hair, dress, etc.) so we're not wondering if male or female, if she's a hippie-chick or a prep...you get it.

And the dark turn...wow. There's such a thing as going for shock value but that was too abrupt.

Here's the good news: Aside from the spelling/grammar/punctuation issues, you've a knack for some very decent and realistic banter. I was impressed with the back and forth ribbing and the direction that was headed.

I'm not going to steer you away form what you want to write but, as it is, the ending just doesn't work.

Keep at it. You've some talent for dialogue and that's not easy.

And welcome to Simply Scripts. Making your first post is the hardest step.