330newmovie
56SCRIPTDIRECT COMMENTS on this script below
3:30am - Synopsis
JILL CUNNINGHAM sleeps, and we see how slowly her internal organs function. She dreams of falling backwards over a cliff, and is suddenly jolted awake, gasping for air. Beside her are photos of her and her FATHER. The next day, a sullen Jill is driven to the hospital by her boyfriend SEAN, directly to her Father's ICU room. Jill's MOTHER is there, demanding Jill's attention but Jill ignores her. Her Father glances at her, tries to speak, then falls again into a coma. At 3:30 that morning, Jill awakens to hear her Father take his last breath.
She later collects his belongings and his death certificate. Silently, she and Sean drive home. When the door lock is jammed, Sean makes a crack that "Daddy's money" will soon change all that, and this infuriates Jill. She is awakened again and again at 3:30am, the exact time of her father's death. Sean apologizes for his insensitivity. At work, where Jill is a hotel manager trainee, her colleagues take pity on her obvious beleaguered state of mind ("My Daddy's gone!") and offer her a sip of hidden whiskey. The manager catches them and sends them back out to do their jobs. Later, alone, Jill is approached by a man with the face of her dead father who says he's trying to warn her ‘of the danger'. She returns home, shaken, and packs up all the photos of the two of them in her bedroom, while Sean tries to cheer her up with a movie and a pizza.
At the pizza place, Jill is drawn outside by the sound of an animal squealing in pain. Outside, she finds a cat with its head cut off, and two little BOY covered in blood. The Boys smile and run off. Sean takes a shaken Jill home; there, she stays awake staring at his death certificate.
They attend the father's funeral, where Jill's Mother again begs for her attention but Jill ignores her. Everywhere she goes, Jill sees watches and clocks stopped at 3:30. Realizing that things are getting out of hand, she goes to see DR. LOGAN, who explains that there is a medical explanation for waking up each night at the time of a particularly memorable event. He suggests she get away from the city for a while. Thinking this a good idea, she mentions it to Sean. When he pays her a visit at the hotel the next day, her colleagues say she is out, and he finds her in the park, sitting on a bench. Jill's Mother sits down beside her and Sean backs off. Jill and her mother argue, and then Jill thinks she sees one of the Boys again, and takes off after him. That night, she is awakened at 3:30am only to find her dead father next to her in bed, staring at her. She gasps. At work the next day, she gets a call from a DETECTIVE, who asks for Sean's phone number. They have questions. Jill freezes, then gives him the number.
CUT TO Jill leaving the city. She gets on a train and heads out to the country, arriving at a small town in the rain. She misses a bus and is taken to the Hotel Friendly by a nice, young cop named SHERIFF COLEMAN. At the Hotel Friendly, where Jill accepted a job, the manager REED shows her around. It's a small six-bedroom bed and breakfast by a lake, mostly patronized by the wealthy. Jill is impressed with the cozy space and delighted to be there, until Reed makes it clear that he is leaving right away. He can't wait to get back to the city. He leaves, and Jill enjoys some time alone, playing music, drinking alone, dancing, etc. After two weeks, the first guest arrives; this is Mr. LE SAUX. She lets him into his room; he says he just wants to sleep. She is then startled by the arrival of an elderly woman, the MAID, who makes snappy jokes and is generally abrasive. That night, Jill hears Mr. Le Saux weeping in his room. When he doesn't stop, Jill goes into his room but he's not there. Through his window, she sees a car pull up outside. Le Saux gets into it, his face twisted in pain, and it drives off.
Concerned, Jill calls Sheriff Coleman, who sees nothing to be upset about. Soon two more guests arrive, two YOUNG BOYS who treat Jill with contempt. She lets them alone, but that night at 3:30, she hears animal wails in their room. Peering through the keyhole, she sees the boys tormenting a dog, cutting of its head. She flees as they come after her and dials the police. Sheriff Coleman arrives but finds nothing - no Boys, no dog, no blood, no axe. Jill can't believe it. When he leaves, however, she sees the Boy get into that same car that pulls up outside and takes them away, screaming.
Jill goes to town to visit the doctor, but he is of no help, offering her pills she doesn't want. She decides to go out on the lake, but in the rowboat, she sees her father's face floating in the water. She falls in, and returns dripping wet to the Hotel. She takes a pill and falls asleep but is again awakened at 3:30am by a crowd of people in white clothing congregating on the front lawn. She tries to chase them away. They grab the Maid, who is terrified, accusing her of killing them. When the police don't answer the phone, Jill calls Sean, only to discover that he is sleeping with her best friend, SUZY. She falls into a deep sleep and is awakened in the morning by Sean, who has driven all night to apologize. They embrace.
That night, Jill glimpses a terrible highway accident on the nightly news. Slowly she realizes what she is seeing: that's Sean's car, crumpled up in the accident that beheaded the driver. She flips out, goes running for Sean, who calms her down. They start to make love but when she opens her eyes, it's Sean's headless body on top of her. She screams and runs outside. Sean's car isn't there. He never came. She rushes back to her empty room, where her Mother sits. Jill tells her mother that she has been dead for six years, she can't be there. But her mother forces her to relive a moment with Sean, when Jill and Sean plotted to kill her father together because he is threatening to cut her out of his will. We watch as the father drinks a poisoned drink and starts to choke. In the hospital room, when the Father glances at Jill, he sees her smiling at Sean, and that's when he knew: she killed him. Jill flees but her dead mother's voice follows her. She races outside and grabs the axe. She screams that it's not true. She sees the headlights of a car and her face lights up with hope. Sheriff Coleman appears and demands that she drop the axe. She begs him for help and slams the axe into the ground. He wants to take her to the emergency room because her finger is cut, but she just wants out, out of there. Fighting sleep, she tells him all the weird things she has seen while at Hotel Friendly.
He drives her to a motel and suggests she lies down while he checks out Hotel Friendly. She takes a shower, tormented by the sight of the boys holding up Jill's bloody head, but then gets into the clothes Coleman brought her and gets into bed. She's exhausted. She has a terrifying nightmare involving the Maid and all the guests from the Hotel Friendly, who chant, "Denial! Denial!" to her ... and her father, retching into the toilet ... and Sean buying a bottle of something ...until she is awakened at 3:30am. She wanders outside, where she sees the name of the motel is being changed ... to the Motel Friendly. All the characters appear to her now, including the doctor, and Sheriff Coleman, explaining that she's not going crazy. She's in denial of the truth, and it's their job to show it to her. "You see, every sinner stops here."
CUT BACK to the moment the Detective called. Jill gives him the phone number, calls Sean to
tell him that they've been caught ... and then leans back and crashes through the hotel window,
falling to her death. It's 3:30 in the morning again, at the Motel. The black car comes for Jill, and she has no choice. She has to get in. It pulls away, her screaming face visible through the back window. In the final sequence, Sean and Suzy drive in his car. She tells him that the police phoned for him. He drops her off at her job at Jill's old hotel, and just then, Jill's body hits the ground before him, slowly. He looks closer - the body's not there. Sean gets on the highway and is cut off by a truck (driven by Sheriff Coleman) and just as he tries to brake, we see his car just about to plow into the truck - and kill him. Blackout.
COMMENTS: Creepy images and choppy structure keep the audience off-balance, but 3:30 lacks a real element of surprise and a deeply satisfying plot.
The dialogue is fairly good, and the pace is quick enough in the second half. The beginning feels a bit slow, even clumsy, and by page 30, it's clear that the author has not come up with a fresh tale but seems to be recycling elements from Poe, David Lynch, Stephen King, and any number of lesser films circa 1995. The author has spent so much energy coming up with twists and images that he forgot to tell a story, and though I've read the script twice, I still cannot explain to you why a soul-in-denial must remain on earth, tormented by conscience and the threat of violence, before taken away in the black tires-crunching-gravel gothic car.
There are real problems with the story. Jill kills her father for the most clichéd reason, money, then regrets it (why?). Her conscience takes the form of her hated, late mother (why?). She is devastated days later when the cops begin an inquiry, and with nothing more than their suspicion of her boyfriend, heaves herself out a window. These are not the actions of a rational person, nor of a psychopath; the author should have picked one or the other and run with it.
The result is that 3:30 telegraphs the message that YOU ARE WATCHING A MOVIE, which all good psychological thrillers are able to suspend. With everything else going so inexplicably wacky, the heroine must behave in a way that makes perfect sense to the audience even as things get worse and worse - that's the nature of the thrill. So 3:30 becomes an exercise one observes, not experiences.
Overall, I don't think it has the chops, regardless of cast, to attract a meaningful mainstream theatrical audience. If your territory has an appetite for decent-but-not-groundbreaking teen thrillers, the visual variety here elevates it to respectability, but not much higher. Do not expect a great return theatrically. Might have some legs on DVD.
WEAK CONSIDER
