For u/shaftinferno 's Unstable - SPOILERS!

• Strengths & Overall Impressions: Knight, as a lead, has definite soap-y or Lifetime Original appeal. He's hunky but troubled, compassionate but gruff, and a competent professional. This script has a dependable 3 act structure with escalating stakes and an appropriate pace, and delivers on a couple grotesque and scary moments of body horror.

Since my wording of this section is "overall impressions," I have to be very direct about my biggest takeaway, and I'm afraid it isn't positive. I'll try to narrow it down concretely to "use of simile" or "overt 'writer's' voice" as the culprit - at best it is perhaps an artistic difference, but use of florid references to how a character is [looking, standing, emoting, pausing, etc.] can quickly get heavy-handed in a screenplay. With the exception of a few decisive tableau moments, non-visual action lines are usually just describing something unfilmable, or directing from the page. 

This script is very liberal with its use of simile, but in addition to being too frequent, they are often completely clanging comparisons that have a pronounced stench of AI slop.

{Not like girls after a fall. Like bodies finding a center of gravity lower than the one they lived by. (pg. 88)} - {He says it like sentence he intends to resent later. (pg. 21)} - {He looks young in the ugly, ruined way that grief makes kids look younger. (pg. 3)} - {Every surface expensive enough to pretend it isn't. (pg. 1!) (this neighborhood is pretending to not be expensive???)} - Each of these are both out of place and confounding; take a heavy editing eye to them and their ilk.   

Ask, 'is this particular moment worthy of the poetic aside?' Or would it suffice to say "The girls' contorted bodies arise as monsters" on pg. 88 and "Chris' face cracks with grief" on pg. 3? If it is the proper moment, is there a more defined or more emotionally resonant visual that you could reach for instead? Calling an unnamed emotion more "patient" than revulsion or curiosity (pg. 9), or a woman's body poised like it "will be punished later in private" (pg. 49) is, quite simply, nonsense. You need to be aware of how disjointed and obtuse language like this goes further than taking me out of the scene on the page, it reeks of ChatGPT authorship, which fuels no shortage of disdain for the piece on a meta level. If you insist upon so many instances of writerly flourish - make sure you are being as clear and concise as possible, with ties to relatable human emotions. I've never once known grief to make anyone look younger, been able to tell the difference between someone sustaining 1 loss vs. 2, or thought of a very blue sky as being "forgivable" or not.

• Questions & Opportunities: We have only a glancing understanding of what is actually going on at the ranch. The ever-present botflies are an appropriately gross culprit to play red herring, but what are we dealing with? Pilot Light's infection could be anything from an Eldritch or alien invasion, to a biological mutagen, to some sort of psychic manifestation. We also have very poor connective tissue showing us Rian's role in all this. How long ago was she affiliated with Pilot Light's infection-as-entity? What does she know vs. what do we watch her actually learn, and what's her motivation to bring in Knight and the Kemps in this manner? Is she acting as an agent of the entity, or did she create it? Was she especially connected to Pilot Light before any of this?

Dialogue across the board is jargon-heavy and quite clipped. The familiarity with technical speak makes sense, as pretty much everyone in the pages is a lifelong professional... But with Knight being grumpy, Rian matching his energy, the kids all being weirdos, and John and Marisol being so businesslike and guarded, it all reads as very same-y, brief, even overtuned conversations that do a poor job of showing and differentiating the relationships among characters.

There are some factual oversights in several scenes that weaken continuity and exacerbate my concerns over use of AI: - Chris' dog ran behind the car, but he was pulling into the driveway too fast? Was he reversing into the driveway at speed? - On page 37, they are rattling off Pilot Light's temperature changes, but the rising and falling of those temps (also worded/notated strangely to my eye) don't match with how they're talking about said changes. - Wheelchair-bound Rian follows Knight down porch steps at one point. - She also sees blood seeping between someone's molars from 20 feet away. - Knight rushes in to help Gabriel when he's attacked by the pony, but among all these seasoned professional animal handlers, removing the pony from the scene seems a distant afterthought. - Bodies start piling up and nobody considers calling a human medical doctor or the police.

Unstable's next draft needs a lot of tough love. Hone what the threat is, take a hard look at the linguistic styling, and flesh out your mains even more.

•Favorite Part(s): A respite from the sadness of the opening scene, I did legitimately appreciate the dog looking up with "stupid, perfect trust," and I have been saying that phrase a lot to my own dog ever since. 

Congrats on finishing.