(Full-length feature. Adapted from the thriller A Lonely Place to Die)
Thriller | Detective
LOG LINE
A criminal psychologist has to risks his life to proof the innocence of a young schizophrenic
charged with the murder of the son of a prominent politician.
ALTERNATIVE LOG LINE
The teenage son of a prominent estate owner and member of parliament died of mushroom
poisoning, nobody else eating the mushroom gravy died. A young, prone to violence
schizophrenic farm laborer is arrested. Is he capable of this calculated murder?
A LONELY PLACE TO DIE
Synopsis
THE TEASER: Mosquito flees the men pursuing him, the viewer experiences reality through the eyes of Mosquito. For him his fast, gasping breathing is a run-away train on a steep downhill, and each breath is searing steam that burns its way to his lungs. His skin shrivels and flakes where the hot light from torches touches him, an angry owl pecks at his eyes. Then the sky forces him down and chokes him into surrender.
THE SCRIPT: After his traumatizing arrest, Mosquito awaits trial in a holding cell in the city. FREDERICK JORDAAN, head of the CID, has doubts about Mosquito’s ability to commit a calculated murder. He asks quirky, but very effective, criminal psychologist, YUDEL GORDON, (the protagonist) to determine whether the prisoner is mentally fit to stand trial or should he be admitted to an asylum, or whether he is even guilty.
Yudel’s work with prison inmates gives him daily opportunities to indulge in his passion – examining and understanding the criminal mind.
Yudel travels by train to Middelspruit, an insular small town in the middle of nowhere and where Mosquito lived all his life. He immediately starts to open the proverbial can of worms and concludes that Mosquito was the convenient suspect and that there was no real investigation, because some of the younger police officers are members of Boere Nasie, a secret Klux Clan-like organization of which the murdered boy seems to have been the leader. Their aim? To save the white man from their millions of black compatriots whom, they fear, are taking over their country. Their assaults on Blacks and Catholic priests were covered up. Probably because Van Aswegen Jnr, the police chief’s son, is one of the ringleaders.
Yudel’s hidden reasons for being in Middelspruit is feared and, being Jewish and English-speaking, he is distrusted and gets no assistance from law enforcement. He starts to suspect that Boere Nasie is somehow involved in the poisoning.
He interviews an inappropriately emotional MARIE, the younger sister of the murdered boy and her friend REBECCA. He suspects that they are lovers.
From Mosquito’s mother and sister in the township, he learns about her son’s life of abuse. On the way back, Van Aswegen Jnr and his cohorts stop him and demand answers explaining his illegal presence in the township after the nine o’clock curfew, without a permit and without the required police escort.
On his way to meet FATHER N’SKOSANA, a priest whose face and arms were badly disfigured during a Boere Nasie acid attack on the local monastery, Yudel passes hooded men next to a dry maize field. He notices N’Skosana in the dry grass in front of them.
The men follow him. He hides his car in a ditch and sneaks back to help the semi-conscious priest, who is much bigger and heavier than himself. He barely reaches the cover of dry maize before the men are back.
The men set fire to the maize to smoke them out. Yudel is assaulted. Unconscious with little chance of survival, he is left in an isolated shed. At dawn he drifts into consciousness and a boy in a pick-up gives him a lift back to town. Rebecca takes him in.
On interviewing Rebecca again, she reluctantly admits that her and Marie have been lovers since the night her brother died.
He starts to suspect who the killer might be, but needs proof.
He takes Marie to a spot in the forest close to her home where he saw a cluster of toad stools growing in a damp and shady glen earlier. He coached her into telling him that she was gang raped in that spot by her brother and his friends. Desperate with nowhere to go and nobody to speak to, there was only way to escape it happening in future. She admitted to the murder.
Yudel summons Frederick Jordaan to come with reinforcements., but he arrives alone.
Frederick tells him that Mosquito was shot dead when he attacked a guard with a sharpened bar that he pried from the burglar bars.
Yudel persuades Frederick to let the quilt remain with Mosquito, he’s dead after all and Marie is nothing more than a child forced to act in self-defence. Reluctantly, Frederick allows himself to be talked into it, provided it is kept between the two of them and Marie goes for counselling.
