Synopsis - (film name here)

Synopsis

Quinn and Max  are a young, ambitious couple, struggling to make their way in the city after a long, relaxed few years in university. They live in a fairly posh town house that Max’s rich parents mostly paid for. They seem to have it better than most.

One night, whilst working the night shift in the hospital, Quinn runs into Francis, the elusive janitor everyone at work is always gossiping about. Quinn drops the bags of blood she is carrying and they burst on the floor. Francis stares at the blood for a second, glares at Quinn and then leaves. Quinn is left bewildered. At home, she frets about what she had witnessed that night, as Max watches her with a concerned expression before leaving for work.

Quinn goes back to the hospital for her next shift, unknowingly rushing until she turns up half an hour early. She confides what happened the night before with her friend, another nurse, Mary. Mary tells Quinn about how she’d had a similar encounter on her night shift the other week at which Francis had said to her ‘mind where you tread.’ Mary seems very troubled and a little scared. Quinn asks her how things are at home with her terminally ill husband, Karl. Mary brushes off the question with a nervous nod of the head and then leaves. Quinn has a long, tiring shift in which a patient of hers died in his sleep. Very stressed, Quinn blames herself and drives home in a daze, leading her to nearly run over a little boy in the street. When she returns home, she breaks down in Max’s arms and falls asleep that way for a few hours. At around 3 in the morning, Quinn awakes suddenly as if she has had some very disturbing dreams. Tired and confused, her body seems to lead her towards the laptop, where she searches the name ‘Francis Denver’, even though she has never known Francis’ last name before. No matches were found. Quinn refreshes the page repeatedly until she falls asleep at the desk.

The next morning, Max awakes Quinn and irritably tells Quinn she has an unhealthy obsession with the janitor. Quinn over reacts, and knocks the laptop onto the floor, causing it to break. Max, alarmed, books her in at a psychiatrist, to which Quinn says she’ll go to, but ends up stalking Francis back to his house. To get to Francis’ house, they have to walk through a dark forest. Quinn loses track of him and turns to head back home when she is hit hard in the head and blacks out. When she wakes up she is unfamiliar to her surroundings and develops a couple of bruises and a nasty gash on her head. As she treats herself she realises that she’s in a room full of bloodstained sacks, supposedly full of bodies. Quinn is confused as to whether they are real or not. She soon blacks out and hears a loud screeching noise

Quinn awakes in hospital after an unfathomable amount of time. She finds out she is lying in the same bed her patient died in before. She is approached by two police officers and an inspector, who accuse her of murdering her fiancé and Mary (the nurse who works with Quinn). Quinn is taken to the police station where she is interrogated. She is shown a number of pictures of Mary before and after her death. Quinn has short but gruesome flashbacks of Mary's body hanging in the janitor's closet. Quinn does not remember anything else except the name, Francis Denver. After a while the police don’t have enough evidence to throw her in jail and she is left under surveillance. Not being able to leave the house, Quinn becomes crazed and depressed. She empties her bedroom and locks herself in with just a picture of her fiancé.

After a few weeks, the inspector breaks into Quinn’s bedroom to find her weak and curled up on the floor. He tells her that they have found more bodies and more evidence that all points towards her. In desperation and insanity, she pounces upon the inspector, bites a chunk out of his shoulder and then makes a run for it. She runs through the forest towards Francis’ house. As she gets closer to the house, flashbacks of what actually happened hit her (Quinn did kill all those people through paranoia). She seemingly shakes it off and runs faster. When she gets to the house, she creeps around the back. Looking weak, insane and barely human, Quinn picks up a brick and enters the house. She creeps up to an armchair where Francis is sat, in a deep sleep. As she is about to hit Francis, he wakes up and there is a big brawl and chase through the house and out into the forest. Whilst the chase is happening, there is confusion as to who is chasing who. Quinn gets more flashbacks of herself running through the same woods, chasing her fiancé with a bloody knife in her hand. We then are shown Francis, running for his life. He stops and hides behind a tree to catch his breath. He hears a twig snap and looks up to see Quinn crouched on a branch, readying to drop the brick on his head.

The film flashes to white and then fades to black, where the credits start.

Now knowing my storyline, I can get a good feel for how the opening should look like. I can now choose tense music to match the suspense during the film. Opening on Quinn in a mental hospital will confuse the audience. A clean, plain setting will give none of the storyline away.