Velocity

What is it like to pin all of your hopes on someone who turns out to be your worst nightmare? Frank Turner was a dumb kid who made a horrible mistake. Drunk and desperate, he drove too fast and took the lives of a young couple. Convicted and sent to prison, he left behind a pregnant girlfriend and drowned himself in drugs and despair. Fast forward twenty years. Frank is getting out of prison with no prospects, no friends, and no family, except for Julie, the daughter not yet born when he went away. Julie is an energetic and intelligent woman living a hardscrabble life, but she is eager to finally have a relationship with her father. Everything is going well until Frank wakes up one morning to discover it is all a lie. Julie reveals that she is not his daughter. Frank’s child is Eric, a scruffy musician, who Julie has seduced and taken hostage. She has also framed Frank for crimes that will send him back to prison for life, which means he cannot go to the police. If Frank wants to survive along with his son, he’s going to have to play Julie’s game. Frank follows Julie to an abandoned motel in the middle of nowhere, where she has laid various traps that set him at her mercy. Julie gleefully tells him that she is the daughter of the couple he killed twenty years ago, given birth by her mother just before she died. Shocked and mortified, Frank pleads with Julie for forgiveness and mercy, but Julie has other plans. Julie proceeds to torture Frank, from drugging him with LSD and making him see demons, to hanging him from a noose that will choke him if he moves, culminating in an indignity that will rock Frank to his very core. She is intent on placing Frank in the hell her life has been since being orphaned and bounced around the foster care system, but that’s not all. She webcasts all of this on the internet as a demo for her new business. She intends to offer her services in webcast torture and murder to people like drug dealers and mobsters, who want to see their enemies brutally dispatched and made an example for the world to see. Eric, Frank’s actual son, observes all of this via video feed while imprisoned in a nearby construction trailer. Julie taunts father and son by allowing them to see each other onscreen, but does not allow Eric to hear what Frank is saying. As we observed these tormented souls, we see Frank come face-to-face with the pain he inflicted on this young woman, seeing his crime from an entirely new perspective. His arc towards realization towards reckoning and possible redemption is as visceral as it is devastating. As for Julie, she finds that exacting revenge on the man who ruined her life impacts her as much as it does him. She takes medications for her issues and performs chanting meditation to keep herself centered, but as the limits of Frank’s physical endurance are tested, so too is the limit of her sanity. Her character is given genuine pathos and depth. This story is written as a thriller with a dramatic core, ideal for a commercially established cast capable of layered performance.