Murder on Mute by Pete Johnson and Quinn Katherman (USA)
Best Short Script
Murder on Mute is a sharp workplace dark comedy that takes one of the most mundane experiences of remote employment — someone being stuck on mute during a Teams meeting — and turns it into a frantic story about corporate exhaustion, friendship, insecurity, and two people desperate for something to interrupt their lives. Diane Winters and Tony Alberti are coworkers whose private language of insults, sexual jokes, complaints, and office gossip has become a world of its own. When their boss Esperanza appears unable to hear them during a morning call, they amuse themselves by saying everything they would never dare tell her directly. Then Esperanza suddenly looks frightened, appears to scream without sound, and freezes on screen in what looks like the middle of an attack. The comic idea is immediate and highly filmable: Diane and Tony are watching what may be a murder through the same digital box they normally associate with tedious meetings, but neither has her address, neither knows what to do, and even during a possible homicide they cannot stop talking about holiday cards, promotions, and their resentment toward their boss.
Pete Johnson and Quinn Katherman’s greatest strength is the relationship between Diane and Tony. The script understands that their friendship is funny because it is affectionate, competitive, cruel, dependent, and occasionally poisonous all at once. The supposed emergency forces them out of their screens and into the real world, where Tony is hit by an e-bike, Diane injures her ankle, an Uber driver throws them out, and their attempt at heroism becomes increasingly disastrous. Underneath that farce, however, the screenplay gradually exposes why both are so invested in a workplace they claim to despise. Tony admits that he never graduated from high school and fabricated the qualifications on his résumé after being thrown out by his parents when he came out; Diane has a Wharton MBA but feels socially incapable of succeeding in a company where charisma and corporate language appear to matter more than competence. Their argument about Tony’s possible promotion leads to one of the script’s best sections because the comedy finally exposes something real: both have constructed versions of themselves that help them survive work, and both suspect the performance has swallowed the rest of their lives. Their admission that they may have wanted Esperanza to be in danger simply because they wanted something to happen gives the absurd plot an unexpectedly sad foundation.
The payoff is very strong. Esperanza is alive; there was a Microsoft outage, she spilled coffee on her keyboard, and Diane and Tony have interpreted a technical failure as a murder in progress. Their relief lasts only moments before Esperanza informs them that both positions have been eliminated — and that Tony completely misunderstood a mentoring conversation as the promise of a promotion. The firing also reframes their friendship: Esperanza describes them as codependent, constantly excluding everyone else through private jokes and behaving like a toxic married couple. Their response is perfectly consistent with the characters the screenplay has built — they destroy her home office together and end the film handcuffed in separate police cars, once again framed inside boxes, silently repeating the obscene joke they shared at the beginning. That final visual callback is particularly good. There are risks in the tone: some racial, sexual, and identity-based jokes are intentionally abrasive and will depend heavily on casting, performance, and direction to feel like two damaged friends attacking each other instead of the screenplay simply reaching for provocation. The Uber sequence comes closest to pushing the characters into caricature, and the office-destruction climax is broader than the more emotionally interesting material that precedes it. Still, the writing has unusual comic confidence, the dialogue has rhythm, Diane and Tony are clearly differentiated, and the premise develops into something much richer than its initial workplace gag.
Strengths: Excellent comic premise; distinctive and confident voice; outstanding chemistry between Diane and Tony; very strong dialogue; contemporary workplace satire; effective escalation from remote meeting to physical farce; characters gain unexpected emotional depth; good balance between vulgar comedy and genuine vulnerability; the false promotion and restructuring payoffs are well prepared; strong visual use of screens and boxes; excellent final callback to the opening; highly attractive material for two comic lead performances.
Weaknesses: Some jokes involving race, sexuality, and identity push close to overwhelming the character-based comedy; the Uber sequence is broader and less precise than the strongest sections; occasional shock lines may divide audiences; Diane and Tony’s roadside confessional section could be tightened slightly; the destruction of Esperanza’s office pushes the ending into larger farce after a more interesting emotional development; Esperanza remains primarily a comic obstacle until late in the screenplay; the licensed song choice may eventually require a production alternative.
Comparable to: Horrible Bosses meets Search Party with elements of The Office (as an aggressively contemporary workplace comedy where narcissism, friendship, corporate ambition, and a completely misread crisis send two deeply flawed coworkers into escalating disaster).
Bully by Lia Martin (USA)
Outstanding Achievement Award
Bully is a psychologically sharp drama about cruelty, denial, and the ways destructive behavior can pass from one generation to the next. The screenplay begins with Lilian McDonald tending a perfectly ordered garden, cutting away the single white violet that breaks the pattern, then scrubbing her hands as though trying to remove something that will not come off. Inside, she carefully manages the appearance of her fifteen-year-old daughter Kacy, even giving her pearls and a scarf that conceals a scar on the girl’s neck. These details become increasingly significant when mother and daughter arrive at the funeral of Bethany Hall, supposedly Kacy’s best friend, and Bethany’s grieving mother refuses to let them inside. Gloria’s accusation and Madison’s question — “Was she, though?” — introduce suspicion without immediately explaining what happened, while brief images of one girl pushing another begin to undermine the version of Kacy that Lilian wants to believe.
Lia Martin is particularly effective in connecting bullying with social performance. Lilian wants a beautiful house, immaculate rooms, proper manners, tasteful clothes, perfect cakes, and acceptance within a suburban community that once excluded her. Her conversation with David reveals that she herself was isolated and mistreated in high school, which gives her desire to create a different social life for Kacy an understandable origin. Yet Lilian is also remarkably skilled at not seeing what she does not want to see. Kacy begins spending time with Bethany’s boyfriend, treats Bethany’s death with chilling casualness, and effortlessly performs the role of the grieving best friend when a social worker visits. The screenplay makes good use of recurring physical objects — the scarf, pearls, cake, medication, necklace, spotless room, obsessive handwashing — to build a world where appearances have become a form of protection. The scene in which Lilian searches Kacy’s room and discovers Bethany’s belongings is especially effective because the evidence forces her to confront what the funeral, the rumors, and her own memories have already been telling her.
The final confrontation gives the screenplay its strongest turn. Lilian accuses Kacy of having treated Bethany as a target, and Kacy finally admits that she “said stuff” and “did stuff,” while insisting that she did not know Bethany would take her own life. Kacy then turns the accusation back on her mother. The earlier scar, Lilian’s obsession with control, the CPS visit, and the recurring shadow images come together in the last flashback: Kacy was pushed onto a branch by Lilian, injured, and left reaching toward her mother while Lilian walked away. This gives Bully a much more troubling idea than a straightforward story about a cruel teenager. Kacy has caused real harm, but she has also learned cruelty inside the relationship that should have taught her safety. Lilian’s own history of exclusion has not made her more compassionate; it has helped produce her fixation on conformity and belonging. The script could give Bethany more presence beyond photographs and fragments, and the Tyler storyline promises consequences that never fully arrive. A few revelations in the confrontation are packed tightly together, and there is at least one dialogue/continuity error in the final exchange that needs correction. Still, the screenplay is concise, visually controlled, dramatically unsettling, and confident enough to end at the moment when Lilian is forced to see the resemblance between the daughter she condemns and herself.
Strengths: Strong visual storytelling; excellent recurring motifs; psychologically complex mother-daughter relationship; efficient fifteen-page structure; effective gradual revelation of Kacy’s behavior; Lilian’s own history adds dimension to her denial; clever use of the scarf and neck scar; strong connection between perfectionism, social acceptance, and cruelty; memorable final reveal; serious thematic ambition; good opportunities for two strong female performances.
Weaknesses: Bethany remains largely an absent dramatic figure despite her central importance; Tyler’s storyline is introduced but not developed very far; some dialogue becomes explicit during the final confrontation; several revelations arrive very close together; Kacy’s extreme coldness in earlier scenes occasionally risks making the later complexity harder to absorb; the exact connection between the CPS involvement and the family history could be clearer; a noticeable dialogue/continuity error appears near the end and requires correction.
Comparable to: We Need to Talk About Kevin meets Thirteen with elements of Sharp Objects (as a disturbing mother-daughter drama about adolescent cruelty, inherited damage, and violence hidden beneath carefully maintained suburban appearances).
Influence by Quinn Katherman (USA)
Honorable Mention
Influence is a biting contemporary drama about reproductive rights, social-media power, hypocrisy, and the unstable line between activism and personal revenge. The screenplay introduces two former best friends through an immediate visual contrast. Kennedy, thirty-nine, presents an immaculate online life of green juice, yoga, wellness and aspirational motherhood to 1.8 million followers; Em, thirty-eight, is breastfeeding a newborn while answering Slack messages and managing two other children in a chaotic house. While Kennedy records a reminder for mothers to “take some time for yourself,” Em receives news of legislation threatening women seeking abortions. Their reunion at an aggressively Instagram-friendly wine bar initially plays as social satire: Kennedy turns lunch into content, secures free food through her follower count, admits she is only a sober vegan online, and treats almost every object and person around her according to how well they can appear on camera. Em has come with another purpose. Her third pregnancy was unwanted, she says she would have chosen an abortion, and by the time she discovered she was pregnant she was already beyond the legal limit in Florida. Kennedy responds with platitudes about motherhood while repeatedly interrupting the conversation to photograph food and herself.
Quinn Katherman handles the confrontation particularly well because neither woman remains morally comfortable for long. Kennedy is initially an easy target: she monetizes an idealized version of motherhood, casually admits that “relatable content” matters more than whether her claimed postpartum anxiety was genuine, and appears disconnected from the conditions faced by women without her money and support. Then Em produces the reason she arranged the meeting: a medical record and receipt from an abortion Kennedy had twenty years earlier, at thirteen weeks, which Em attended and paid for. Her demand is not money. She wants Kennedy to tell her followers what happened, mobilize them politically and use her platform to raise money for reproductive rights; if Kennedy refuses, Em intends to leak the medical record herself. The conflict becomes much stronger at this point because Em’s argument has moral urgency while her method is deeply invasive. She is threatening to expose another woman’s private medical history in the name of protecting women’s freedom. Kennedy’s commercial cynicism is ugly, but Em’s certainty that a good cause authorizes the destruction of someone else’s privacy gives the screenplay real dramatic tension.
The final reversal takes the script another step further. Kennedy reveals that the pregnancy had been caused by Kyle, Em’s current husband, and recognizes the personal grievance buried inside Em’s political mission. Her accusation that Em has come to “destroy one” woman while claiming to save others turns the argument back onto Em without absolving Kennedy of her own hypocrisy. Kennedy then demonstrates exactly what influence means in this world. She photographs the beautiful golden-hour table with a crying Em visible in the background, posts the image before leaving, casts herself as the person escaping a toxic old friendship, and lets her followers construct the villain for her. Within seconds Em is being identified and attacked in the comments while the likes accelerate into the thousands. It is an excellent ending because the screenplay’s argument about social media is finally expressed through action: Kennedy does not need to prove anything, disclose anything, or even lie explicitly. She controls the frame, and the audience supplies the story. A few weaknesses remain. Some of Em’s political dialogue becomes close to a prepared argument, particularly when she explains exactly how Kennedy should use her platform, and the fictional legislation introduced at the beginning is so extreme that it risks pulling attention toward the mechanics of the political premise. Kennedy’s influencer persona is deliberately broad in the first half, and trimming a few jokes about branding, food, and wellness could bring the central confrontation forward sooner. Yet these are relatively minor concerns in a screenplay that is focused, provocative, very well structured, and willing to complicate the motives of both women instead of providing the audience with a comfortable moral winner.
Strengths: Excellent two-character conflict; highly contemporary premise; strong opening contrast between curated and lived motherhood; sharp dialogue; Kennedy and Em both change in the audience’s estimation as the story progresses; excellent use of influencer culture as dramatic machinery; abortion record reveal significantly raises the stakes; strong ethical conflict between political purpose and personal privacy; Kyle revelation complicates Em’s motives without invalidating the larger issue; powerful final reversal; excellent closing image and social-media payoff; strong opportunities for two lead performances.
Weaknesses: Some political dialogue becomes overtly argumentative; Em occasionally explains her position at greater length than necessary; Kennedy’s early influencer satire is broad enough that a few beats could be cut; the opening legislation is deliberately extreme and may compete with the more complex personal conflict; most of the screenplay takes place across one table, placing considerable pressure on performance and direction; Kyle’s connection to Kennedy arrives very late and could benefit from one additional earlier clue.
Comparable to: Promising Young Woman meets Ingrid Goes West with elements of The Social Network (as a confrontational story about two women carrying old grievances into a present-day political conflict, where image, influence, private information and control of the public narrative become weapons).
I Love You Tammy Cunningham by Gregory Paul (USA)
Nominee
I Love You Tammy Cunningham is a funny and unexpectedly affecting coming-of-age story set in 1983, following nine-year-old Owen Fisher as he tries to impress the neighborhood girl he is hopelessly in love with while his family is quietly falling apart around him. Owen lives with his sisters Brandy and Fern and their father Glen in a house where dishes, garbage and unopened mail have accumulated since their mother left. Glen has retreated into the basement, twelve-year-old Brandy has taken on responsibilities far beyond her age, and the children have largely been left to manage themselves. Owen, however, is focused on Tammy Cunningham and the lemonade stand down the street. When neighborhood show-off Rocky Rockwell arrives in a new go-kart and challenges him to a race, Owen claims he has one too and immediately commits himself to building it. The screenplay establishes its world quickly and with considerable personality, moving comfortably between the absurdity of childhood ambition and the painful evidence of a family whose parent has stopped functioning.
Gregory Paul’s strongest achievement is the Fisher family. Owen, Brandy and Fern behave like siblings instead of characters created to deliver information, and their constant insults, arguments and alliances give the screenplay much of its humor. The go-kart construction sequence is especially successful. Owen’s imagination transforms their crude homemade vehicle into a candy-apple-red racing machine complete with turbo power, explosions, a Valkyrie, a triumphant crowd and Tammy waiting with a trophy, before the fantasy ends and reveals the crooked, badly painted death trap the children have actually built. The joke works, but it also captures the confidence of a nine-year-old who has no idea how dangerous his project really is. When the kart eventually fails and Owen suffers a serious arm fracture, the accident becomes the event that finally pulls Glen back toward his children. His conversation with Brandy afterward is one of the screenplay’s best scenes: she believes she caused the crash because she had wished for it, while Glen recognizes that his own withdrawal has forced his daughter into the role of substitute parent. Mrs. Meyer is equally important without taking over the story, entering initially because Owen stole her lawnmower wheels and gradually becoming the adult who sees how badly the family needs help.
The final section gives the story a satisfying payoff because Owen’s original goal changes. Glen repairs the go-kart with his children, begins cooking again, takes care of the house and reconnects with all three of them. When they eventually return to Tammy’s lemonade stand, Owen has the opportunity he wanted from the beginning: Tammy is encouraged to sign his cast and Brandy even instructs her to draw hearts. Owen stops her and asks whether she actually wants to do it. When she cannot answer, he tells her she does not have to. It is a small but convincing moment of growth. The boy who risked breaking his neck to make Tammy like him finally understands that affection cannot be engineered through a stunt. More importantly, he walks home holding his father’s hand, and the title’s childhood romance has become the route into a broader story about a family finding its way back to one another. The script could still be tightened. At roughly forty pages, several domestic passages could be compressed, Rocky remains a fairly conventional bully, and Glen’s confrontation with him becomes more explicit and intimidating than the rest of the screenplay needs. Some dialogue also explains lessons that are already visible through the characters’ actions. Even so, I Love You Tammy Cunningham has a strong voice, well-observed family dynamics, good comic timing and an emotional resolution that grows naturally from what happens to the characters.
Strengths: Strong and distinctive voice; believable sibling relationships; excellent balance of humor and family drama; memorable nine-year-old protagonist; very effective go-kart fantasy montage; Mrs. Meyer is a strong supporting character; convincing progression in Glen’s return to fatherhood; good period atmosphere; several genuinely funny exchanges; emotional moments are supported by character behavior; satisfying final reversal of Owen’s original goal; strong potential for young performers and an ensemble cast.
Weaknesses: Long for a short screenplay; several domestic sequences could be compressed; Rocky is comparatively one-dimensional; Tammy functions more as Owen’s idealized crush than as a fully developed character; Glen’s confrontation with Rocky becomes somewhat heavy-handed; a few thematic points are stated after the action has already communicated them; the exact circumstances surrounding the mother’s departure remain fairly limited despite their importance to the family’s collapse.
Comparable to: The Sandlot meets Little Miss Sunshine with elements of Kramer vs. Kramer (as a funny and bittersweet childhood story in which an apparently simple neighborhood adventure exposes a damaged family and ultimately helps bring a father back into his children’s lives).
The Only One I See by Clinton Morales (USA)
Nominee
The Only One I See is a dark supernatural romance built around a striking idea: seventeen-year-old Slater has spent five years avoiding eye contact because anyone who looks directly into his eyes is compelled to kill themselves. The curse first destroys his family when both parents die in front of him, and subsequent encounters confirm that the effect is immediate and beyond his control. Since then, Slater has withdrawn from society and lives in a cabin with Mrs Downs, an elderly woman who constantly reminds him that he is dangerous and unwanted. The screenplay changes direction when Slater meets Jenny, a blind teenager sitting alone at Salem Willows Park. For the first time in years, he can look directly at another person without causing harm. When Jenny asks if she is beautiful, Slater opens his eyes, looks at her face and realizes that nothing happens. His answer — “You are… beautiful” — is simple, but the situation gives it genuine emotional value. The premise immediately creates a strong romantic paradox: the only person Slater can safely see is someone who cannot see him.
The relationship between Slater and Jenny gives the screenplay its most appealing material. Both are isolated teenagers living with neglectful or abusive guardians, and their friendship develops through dark humor, music, teasing, physical affection and a shared feeling that neither fits comfortably into the world around them. The haircut sequence is particularly effective because Jenny recreates the hairstyle Slater had before his parents died, allowing him to look into a mirror and recognize himself again. Their visit to the record shop works for similar reasons, using Slater’s love of heavy metal and Jenny’s interest in shoegaze to give them something to discover about each other beyond their personal suffering. The screenplay also has a clear visual identity: Salem’s commercialized witch culture, Slater constantly looking toward the ground, Jenny’s white cane, the repeated imagery of eyes, and the contrast between his dangerous sight and her blindness could translate strongly to screen. The difficulty is that the romance develops much too quickly. Jenny asks Slater to become her boyfriend less than twenty-four hours after they meet, and several conversations move directly from trauma to jokes to declarations of emotional dependence. Their connection is believable as an idea, but the screenplay would benefit from giving it more time and allowing affection to emerge through behavior before the characters explain exactly what they mean to one another.
The final revelation is ambitious and ties together details planted throughout the story. Mrs Downs is revealed to be Ruby’s guardian, Ruby was Slater’s childhood friend, and Slater’s parents were secretly serial killers collecting their victims’ eyes. After they abducted Ruby and removed her eyes, Mrs Downs discovered her dying and used witchcraft to place the eye-contact curse on Slater. It explains the eye imagery, the Salem setting, Mrs Downs’ connection to Slater, and the origin of his condition, but it also creates a major dramatic problem: Mrs Downs knowingly punishes an innocent twelve-year-old for crimes committed by his parents, then takes him into her home and mistreats him for five years. Her decision to free him only through her own death does not fully resolve that contradiction, and the curse itself apparently remains. The script also reaches forty-six pages because many conversations repeat information already understood, while several supporting characters are drawn in exaggerated terms that push the story toward broad dark comedy. Slater’s long speech explaining what Jenny means to him extends across several pages and would gain power from substantial compression. There is nevertheless a distinctive film inside The Only One I See. The central concept is memorable, Slater and Jenny have an unusual romantic dynamic, and the title receives a satisfying payoff when Jenny gives him dark glasses and tells him that she will remain “the only one” he can safely see. A tighter version with more natural dialogue, a slower romantic progression, and stronger logic behind Mrs Downs’ actions could turn the premise into a much stronger supernatural coming-of-age story.
Strengths: Highly memorable central premise; clever connection between Slater’s lethal eye contact and Jenny’s blindness; strong title concept and payoff; distinctive Salem setting; effective recurring eye imagery; sympathetic central characters; good use of music and alternative youth culture; the haircut and record-store scenes develop the relationship beyond the supernatural premise; ambitious final revelation; strong visual and genre potential.
Weaknesses: Forty-six pages is excessive for the current story; romance develops too rapidly; characters frequently explain their emotions at length; several conversations repeat information; some dialogue sounds written instead of naturally spoken; supporting characters can become caricatures; Mrs Downs’ motivation for cursing an innocent child is difficult to reconcile with her later remorse; the serial-killer-parent revelation is inventive but adds considerable plot machinery very late; Jenny’s blindness sometimes functions too conveniently within the plot and should be handled with greater character detail; grammar, spelling and screenplay formatting require another revision.
Comparable to: Bird Box meets The End of the F**ing World* with elements of Warm Bodies (as a dark teenage supernatural romance about two isolated young people whose unusual circumstances make intimacy both dangerous and unexpectedly possible).
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