BEDSITTERLAND
Feature Film - Drama
Home-schooled, and raised in rural isolation by her protective father GILES and invalid mother MARIANNE, socially naïve but plucky JUDITH is excited to embark on an independent new life in the big city. But shortly after her arrival a violent agoraphobic attack traps her within her scruffy multi-occupancy bedsit house. She fashions an ingenious indoor life for herself, recruiting one fellow-tenant, carefree backpacker IAN, as an ally for practical challenges, and being inspired by another, reclusive wheelchair-bound painter WILLIAM, to envisage an emotionally fulfilling existence without ever going outdoors again. Meanwhile she resists the increasing urgent pleas from Giles to abandon her foolhardy move and return to her remote country home and ailing mother. But as ominous clouds gather, both literally and figuratively, she’s forced to decide between safety and freedom.
She can’t leave her new home – and her old home won’t leave her.
SUMMARY
Genre: Feature Film, Drama
Role: Writer / Director
Status:
QF Academy Nicholl Fellowship 2019
QF Final Draft Big Break 2019
Selected for Berlinale Co-Production Market 2020
Screenplay further developed with support of Screen Ireland.
Irish Producers Honest Arts attached.
Selected for Limerick Film Lab Slate Presentation at Edinburgh International Film Festival 2025
Seeking: International Co-Production
JUDITH (19) leaves the remote rural home, where she has been raised and home-schooled in seclusion by her protective alternative healer father GILES and invalid mother MARIANNE, to take her first job in the big city. Plucky and preternaturally observant, but also totally innocent and socially inept, she moves into a bedsit in crumbling multiple-occupancy period house.
But within days of her arrival, an innocent flirtation at a house party to which she’s charitably invited by JO and JANE, the party animal nurses downstairs, brings on a violent agoraphobic attack in which she feels like she’s being snatched bodily off the face of the earth. The next morning she can’t step beyond the front door of the house because of the vicious sky waiting to attack.
After an initial bout of despair and deprivation, Judith begins to fashion an ingenious indoor life for herself in which all her practical needs can be satisfied without her ever leaving the building.
She recruits fellow-tenant, the carefree promiscuous IAN, as an ally in her mission, and begins using home delivery and the internet to fulfil all her professional and personal requirements.
She also meets the wheelchair-bound recluse WILLIAM, an artist who has turned his own spacious attic apartment into a richly painted wonderland of scenes from around the globe, his work inspired by regular descriptive letters from a mysterious and well-travelled correspondent, “H”. When William employs Judith to read out H’s letters for him as he paints, and in return agrees to teach her to paint too, Judith starts to see in his example the real possibility of living an emotionally fulfilling existence without ever going outdoors again – despite the misgivings of the freedom-loving and increasingly infatuated Ian.
But as, encouraged by William, she strives to find creative inspiration in her own memories, fragments of a traumatic repressed images from her early childhood begin to emerge. She is simultaneously bombarded by ever more troubling messages from home, as her father implores her to give up her independence and return to the nest where he can keep her safe from the toxic outside world. The key elements of her novel new life fracture as her father, employer, landlady and the medical authorities express increasing concern about her mental health.
Her struggles come to a head when a fatal fire in the alcoholic landlady’s basement flat leads to the ultimate crisis: the house is to be sold and all the tenants forced to leave. Will Judith have to move back home and give up her hard-won independence? For William, too, this is a disaster: he will have to abandon the carefully constructed artificial world of his painting-filled attic.
To Judith and Ian’s surprise William expresses a desire to go up onto the house’s roof to see the wider world once more – and Judith is aghast when he insists that she help Ian lift him up through the skylight. She reluctantly agrees when he promises to hold her hand throughout and equips her with a headpiece fashioned from an artist’s viewfinder to allow her to control how much of the cityscape she is exposed to. Having calmed Judith’s nerves so that she can start to appreciate the beauty of the outside world again, William almost persuades her to take off the headpiece – but the arrival of Giles to collect her proves too strong to resist, despite the smitten Ian begging her to stay.
But as Giles helps her leave her bedsit, Judith has a moment of revelation which fills in the final piece of her lost traumatic memory and reveals the cause of her agoraphobia: both her and Giles were present at her older sister Caroline’s fatal road accident many years before, something he’s never told her. As Judith numbly allows herself to be driven away, to Ian’s horror William rolls his wheelchair off the roof to his death. Later, as Ian is clearing out William’s apartment, he finds a portrait that William has secretly painted of Judith – standing happy and free on a New York street.
Now effectively imprisoned back in her isolated rural home by both her condition and by Giles, who has confiscated her phone and laptop, Judith learns from her ailing mother Marianne the final truth that Caroline’s death occurred while she was trying to escape from Giles’s obsessive control.
One day, while her father is out, William’s secret portrait of her arrives by delivery van, sent by Ian. This alternative vision of a future gives her the courage to finally leave the house, walk to the scene of Caroline’s accident, and make her peace with the memory. The curse is broken, she no longer fears being outside.
Having borrowed a phone from a passing cyclist, she asks Ian to come rescue her and her mother – but is dismayed when Marianne insists on staying with Giles, despite his controlling nature and her own failing health. At a loss, Judith realises she has one more card to play: she rushes to her dead sister’s room and begins to frantically etch on the blank wall with childhood crayons.
When Giles returns unexpectedly, he sees her packed bags and tries to prevent her leaving – but she breaks his resistance by forcing him to look at what she’s beautifully sketched in Caroline’s room: the entire scene of the accident that killed her, including Giles scooping the infant Judith into his arms to protect her.
Forced to accept his own role in Caroline’s death, the broken Giles steps aside and lets Judith leave her family home forever, now liberated from both agoraphobia and his control.
In a final coda, Ian, now in an airy new home, receives yet another postcard from the globe-trotting Judith – this one from New York City. We close on a scene of her driving an open-top jeep joyously into the ultimate city of freedom.
Bedsitterland is an unusual coming-of-age drama, with strong psychological thriller elements, in which a damaged but determined protagonist strives ingeniously to create a sustainable way of living independently despite her agoraphobia, and then is forced to confront the long-buried trauma that has caused it.
This story derives from my enduring fascination with two core themes that I believe to be more universally relevant and resonant today than ever:
1. The possibility of living a full – and maybe even fulfilling – life without ever going outside one’s own front door.
2. The essential human need for us all to separate from our birth family and forge lives of our own, however scary and lonely that prospect seems.
Other sub-themes include the power – and limits – of art as a substitute for real life; the rise of alternative healing and lifestyles, and the potential dangers attaching to extreme forms of same; and the prevalence of mental health challenges in young adults, and the link between same and (often-repressed) traumatic past events.
Despite the dark territory that she must negotiate, Judith’s journey from psychological imprisonment to personal freedom is thrilling, empowering, often amusing – and ultimately heroic.
Bedsitterland will be atmospheric, gripping, visually rich, emotionally intense and dramatically satisfying – but also with moments of comedy and light relief. It’s a very specific coming-of-age drama in which we follow the journey of a plucky young woman raised in isolation who sets out for the big city to gain her independence.
She is thrust into, and then trapped within, an unfamiliar new world from which she cannot escape and therefore must innovate and create to survive.
This world is peopled by a limited but vividly diverse cast of characters, each of whom lives in their own richly individual sub-environment, with whom our hero begins to interact and even enjoy her ersatz new indoor life, and through whom she learns and grows.
But dark forces from her own past, unwittingly unleashed by her bid for freedom, gather ominously to threaten her.
Finally, she is forced to leave the sanctuary that she has come to rely on for safety in order to confront both her fears and the ultimate source of them, back in the place that is most existentially challenging for her, in order to finally become truly free.
It is my profound belief and invariable experience that casting is the most important decision that any film-maker ever has to make. I love working with actors, and my greatest priority is to find the right collaborators to help unlock my stories, and to create for them the best conditions in which to do their best work.
Every moment onscreen is a moment of truth – so every actor needs to be not just great, but also great for this particular role. When one is telling a story with a relatively limited number of key roles, the choice of who is to embody each of those roles becomes proportionally even more vital.
Because I believe that this is a film with great commercial as well as artistic potential, I’m also keenly aware of the huge impact on distribution and publicity prospects of having recognisable names on our poster, and am therefore determined that at least one of our core roles be played by an actor with high profile internationally.
The uniquely cosmopolitan setting of our story does allow us to potentially draw on talent from more than one country. Bedsit houses are usually transient or temporary accommodations rather than permanent homes, and by their very nature routinely house people of widely differing backgrounds. While our story is set in contemporary Dublin, any or all of our core supporting cast – William, Ian, Jamie and Jo – could in principle be from countries other than Ireland, and I think at least some of them should be.
Judith (19) is a singular young woman of (initially at least) few words but great determination. She suffers from agoraphobia and has been raised in an extremely sheltered and alternative environment – and yet she has the courage to overcome her fears and travel to a distant city, to share a house with strangers, and to expose herself to new experiences. This isn’t easy for her – she is preternaturally watchful and wary, most comfortable in her own company – but some primal part of her realizes that she needs to escape the shackles of her upbringing if she is to blossom as a human being.
Her manner is unconventional but her life force is very strong. She should be a powerful physical actor and have the kind of charisma that allows a camera to stay with her for long dialogue-free takes. She is no pushover – her feral survival instincts will repel most casual flirts or threats – but she should also be able to allow us see and share her vulnerability, her wonder at new experiences and even occasionally her amusement at the comical shortcomings of herself or those she encounters.
While there are a number of young Irish actors who could be great in this role, I think the Irish-Canadian actress AMYBETH McNULTY (Anne With an E, Stranger Things) is the ideal casting choice, with just the right combination of wide-eyed innocence and determination. She has read and loves the script and we have had a long and fruitful discussion with her about the role. I am very excited to have offered her the part of Judith, subject to finance.
WILLIAM (60s) is a recluse, a misanthrope, and a creature of extreme habit. His alienation is a result of more than his physical disability. In his own eyes he hasn’t been rejected by society; he just can’t be bothered with its lies and weaknesses. But there’s no doubt that he once loved, and when that love crumbled what he lost was more than just a romantic partner. Pride has made William lonely. Talent has enabled him to create an alternative universe for himself that allows him all the colour and richness of the outside world without any of the emotional risks of living in it. And he’s brave too – he doesn’t shrink from the consequences of the extreme decisions he’s taken. He is the king of this magical kingdom – even if his only subjects are ones conjured up in expert strokes of paint from the descriptions in H’s letters and shards of his own memories of a time long before when he still moved through the world rather than just painted it.
William, too, could well be from another country; certainly he has no family or visitors living in the vicinity. Despite being confined to a wheelchair, he should not come across as weak or ailing; on the contrary he should feel like a powerful force – menacing even in a certain light – as he roams this extraordinary alternative globe he has created. But there will be moments in our story where a crack appears in his armour, and we will see what this stoicism (or bloody-mindedness) has cost him.
ANTONIO BANDERAS would play William brilliantly. Other options I’ve been considering are Jeremy Irons, Kim Bodnia, Bill Nighy and John Malkovich.
IAN (mid-20s) personifies free spirits, free love and freedom from responsibility. He’s cheerfully and unapologetically promiscuous, and unconcerned (if occasionally mystified) by other people’s disapproval. He travels light, rolls with the punches, and doesn’t sweat the small things – or even most of the big things. He’s a bit big-headed, a bit thoughtless, a bit selfish. But he’s not unkind, and not a hypocrite – he shrugs off rejection as easily as commitment. He’s not a trust-fund kid, and he’s a good worker when he puts his mind to it, well able to hold down his busy bar job.
Lurking beneath his slacker surfer-dude there is a conscience that occasionally pricks: he doesn’t think of himself as a bad guy, and (outside of sex, where all’s fair) doesn’t feel good about letting others down. There’s a family back home he feels guilty about not calling more often, and grateful co-workers he’s helped out by taking on their shifts at short notice. Ian’s a big kid, really – and even though he drives us a bit crazy, he’s hard not to have a soft spot for. He’s probably pretty physically fit and good looking, with an open vibe.
Of all our main characters, Ian’s the one who almost definitely shouldn’t be Irish: he’s a globe-trotter, a sipper-and-flitter, a seeker after new experiences. I’ve written him as Australian, but he could be American, Scottish, Dutch, from anywhere really…
GILES (50) has struggled against great external and internal pressures to keep his little family together. He has invested every ounce of his energy to do what in his mind is best for his wife and his surviving daughter, and to shield them from a wider world that he’s long mistrusted. He’s deeply scarred by the devastating effects of the loss of his elder daughter, and this has made him protective to the point of paranoia of his remaining family members. He knows intellectually that he must allow Judith more independence, and he’s trying his best to do so, but this is causing the tectonic plates of his own personality to shift and buckle – he loves her so much, fears for her so deeply, sees so clearly what is best for her, and is so horrified by the mounting evidence of the damage her rash decision to leave home is doing both to herself and to her mother.
Aside from being of the same nationality as Judith, the main thing we are looking for in Judith’s father is a sense of genuine kindness, sympathy and paternal love. We need to be truly shocked when his true nature and the threat he ultimately poses to Judith’s yearning for independence becomes clear. Again, we want somebody who, while gentle, is physically quite strong, and while kind, has the capacity to harden and become formidable.
Still very common around the city of Dublin despite the rise of new apartment developments, bedsit houses are typically Victorian-era period buildings, originally family homes that have been carved up from into multiple smaller dwelling units opening onto a common stairwell, and sharing a single front door.
These bedsit houses are generally owned and operated by private landlord-investors with fairly minimal interference or oversight by the State, and are often clustered in run-down areas close to the city centre (hence their popularity with students and migrant workers). They’re often poorly maintained and designed for maximum landlord income rather than tenant comfort.
The lion’s share of the action in Bedsitterland is set in the various rooms and common areas of a single multi-occupancy bedsit house.
Seen through the heightened gaze of our protagonist Judith, each of these rooms will manifest as its own distinctive world – with its own colour palette and soundtrack – reflecting the lifestyle of its occupant(s).
The stairwell will be the neutral zone through which our characters move between their individual private kingdoms and the outside world beyond the building’s front door.
When she is finally forced to leave the haven of the bedsit house and travel away from the city with her father Giles, we follow Judith to the very opposite of the setting of the first two Acts: the vast empty landscape surrounding the house where she grew up, and where her infant self witnessed the trauma that led to her psychological disturbance.
For Judith’s visit to the scene of Caroline’s accident (and various flashback / dream shots of same) we are seeking a junction of a country road and another more main road, but again in this very remote and spectacular landscape.
There are also various interior scenes set within her rural family home. I am happy that we will shoot these in a suitable rural dwelling rather than in a studio set. For reasons of aesthetics and practicality we may “cheat” these interior scenes to a different location from the exterior scenes.
Because we are taking in this world through the heightened point of view of Judith, we see everything as she does. Her problem is that she is overwhelmed by the amount of visual information the outside world throws at her. Even small sparse spaces feel rich and broad to her.
Far from being claustrophobic, each room in the house will feel like its own universe – with its own colour palette, art direction and soundtrack, reflecting the tastes and traits of its particular inhabitant(s).
We will film in wide angle, and use set builds to exaggerate the scale of these interior spaces, and extremely careful art direction to give each one an individual look and feel.
The sense of depth and richness of these worlds will be enhanced by cutaways of the tiny details that Judith’s hyper-observant eyes pick up.
Soundtrack, too, will play a significant role, with each room potentially having its own distinctive musical theme.
Sound design will be crucial to underline and amplify the moments of suspense and danger in particular.
In addition to what we do in camera and production design, we’ll be using CGI to create some of the more exaggerated effects that reflect Judith’s fear of open spaces – specifically the threatening warping of the sky.
Bedsitterland is a story that will resonate with a wide audience – basically, with anyone who’s ever taken that first scary jump out of the parental nest, and who knows what it’s like to trade the comfortable confines of the home they were raised in for the scary but exhilarating independence of their first squalid flat.
It’s both an unusual coming of age drama, and a psychological thriller with tension, twists and turns, existential fear, and a riveting showdown at the end.
Given the age of our protagonist and many of the other key characters she encounters (Ian, Jamie, Jo), and the themes we deal with, our primary audience would be females under 25, but with strong four quadrant crossover appeal.
Here are a few films to which I believe Bedsitterland will have similar appeal:
