there's this thing that I've wanted to do as a short film for a long time, and it's based on a story from the Bible (1 Kings 14). Long story short: Jeroboam's son gets sick, he sends his wife to go and talk to the prophet Ahijah, Ahijah tells Jeroboam's wife how Jeroboam's house will be torn down and destroyed because of his sin, Ahijah tells Jeroboam's wife that her son will die when she arrives home, she goes home, and the son dies.
So this is my idea for the short film:
it starts with this brief part where the wife says goodbye to her son, tells Jeroboam she'll be back shortly, and then leaves to go and speak with Ahijah. There's a long shot of her leaving the city, with the city on the left of the screen, and she's just a tiny figure silhouetted against the hills as she walks across toward the right. The music through here is very quiet and unnoticeable, but even though it's slow, it's a little hopeful.
She talks to Ahijah. He tells her that her husband's house will be destroyed and that her son will die when she arrives home.
She leaves his house. This is where the music cuts out. It's replaced by a very quiet, steady heartbeat.
The wife leaves Ahijah's house and starts back to the city. We get the long shot again, the wife silhouetted and tiny against the hills. This time, she's travelling right-to-left. This is the insanely cool part, because in cinema, heroes move left-to-right and villains move right-to-left. She's just found out that her husband's house will be torn down and that the moment she returns home her son will die. There's nothing hopeful or heroic about this part of her journey.
She reaches the gate of the city, and just stands there. As she walks through the gate, the heartbeat skips a beat. It picks back up again, but it's getting louder and less regular.
We switch to an arial shot, one of those rising and circling ones, as we see the wife making her way through the streets of the city to her home.
Then we cut to the doorframe of her house. The doorframe is on the left, and she's approaching from the right. The heartbeat, which has been steadily getting louder and stuttering more, is deafening now.
She steps forward slowly, barely lifting her feet. She doesn't want to do this, but she knows there's no way around it. As she lifts her foot to step into the house, she just stops and stands there. The heartbeat should be loud enough to feel in your bones here. It's vibrating everything. There's no other music.
She puts her foot down, and there's dead silence.
We never leave that camera view of the floor and the threshold. We just see her go down on her knees, the camera missing her face entirely and just focusing on her bent knees and bowed back. The music finally starts again, but there's no beat anymore. It's just a single, drawn-out note that goes on, and on, and on. It doesn't stop when the credits roll. After the credits end, there's a full minute of a black screen before the note finally cuts out and it's just silence.
And then, just before the short film ends, we hear the beginning of her first sob.
if i'm ever a movie director, i want to do that so much
