A reader's report, written by Script 360's AI coverage system.
Read 6 September 2026 · from the First Draft draft · 103 pages · read as a Feature Film
This writer's best instinct is literary architecture — using a classic novel as a literal blueprint for the story's own reveal, so that a piece of advice given in passing on page 24 pays off as a physical set forty pages later.
On a dining table: A fine china place-setting for two and a silver candle centerpiece under a thick coating of dust and cobwebs.p.105
A grieving veteran returns to Brooklyn planning to murder the man who killed his police-officer father as a boy, but a job at an old woman's antique bookstore, a romance with a single mother, and a family secret hidden across two generations pull him toward forgiveness instead.
This is a grief-and-redemption drama that opens as a cop-killing crime story, spends most of its middle section as a gentle bookstore/diner romance, and closes as an explicit afterlife fantasy in which two supporting characters are revealed to be ghosts of the dead watching over the living. The strongest instinct on the page is literary: Dylan works at an antique bookstore, is handed Great Expectations by a mysterious mentor who tells him to 'study your surroundings,' and the film's big reveal is a literal Miss Havisham room — a dust-covered wedding table Rose has kept frozen since 1945. That's a genuinely clever piece of architecture. The problem is that Dylan's stated goal — killing Peter Pierson — is introduced on page 13 and then all but disappears from the page for roughly sixty pages while the story becomes an episodic sequence of newsstand banter, bookstore customer-service jokes, and diner flirtation, so when the revenge plot resurfaces late it reads as a second movie bolted onto the first rather than an escalation. The two big supernatural reveals (Charles is Rose's dead husband John, Nick is Dylan's dead father Michael) land with almost no seeding beyond one joke about old newspapers, so the ending asks for a leap of faith the middle section hasn't earned. There's real warmth here — Brandon is a well-drawn child, Nick's banter has genuine comic rhythm — but the script currently reads as three tonally distinct stories (crime drama, rom-com, angel fantasy) that never quite negotiate their handoffs.
Ghost · Return to Me · The Lovely Bones · Great Expectations (1998) · Fireproof
Older or faith-adjacent drama audiences drawn to grief-and-forgiveness stories with a sentimental, redemptive payoff, more likely to find this on a streaming or faith-market platform than in wide theatrical release.
The opening promises a revenge-and-grief story with real stakes: a cop is murdered in front of his partner, who then raises the boy on the dead man's behalf. That's a workable, emotionally legible engine. But the script immediately complicates its own promise by spending the bulk of its pages on a low-stakes workplace romance before returning to the revenge plot, and by adding a second premise — Rose is secretly Dylan's biological grandmother, and two supporting men are ghosts — that the opening gives no hint of at all. The idea is worth telling, but as written it's really two premises stitched together (a revenge drama and a guardian-angel fantasy) rather than one idea sustained for 110 minutes, and the script never quite decides which one it's advertising.
First his mother, now me.p.9 — the inciting wound, stated with real economy
I just need you to find this person, no questions asked.p.13 — the revenge quest is launched early and clearly
Because I'm gonna kill the man who murdered my father.p.79 — the clearest, latest restatement of what the premise is actually about
The film's spine — will Dylan kill Peter Pierson — is set up on page 13 and then goes almost entirely dormant until roughly page 76, during which the middle act becomes a sequence of largely interchangeable vignettes (bookstore customers, newsstand chats, diner scenes, a first date) marked off by 'SUPER' time-jumps rather than escalating cause and effect. That's a saggy middle by any measure: nothing in it raises the stakes of the central want, it just accumulates incident. The revenge plot then races through discovery, stalking, and abandonment inside about twenty-five pages, followed immediately by an entirely separate supernatural climax (Rose's death and the ghost reveals) that has its own build and its own resolution. Two climaxes this close together, resolving two different stories, dilutes the power of both instead of compounding them.
LEGEND: "THREE MONTHS LATER"p.27 — one of several loose time-jumps that substitute for causal escalation
You keep looking -- Hey, look, I paid you.p.47 — the only on-page reminder of the revenge plot for dozens of pages
Dylan removes a black-and-white photo... on the back is written 6/19/45.p.107 — the mystery-plot climax and the revenge-plot climax are stacked back to back rather than woven together
Dylan's want is stated with real clarity once — the confession booth scene is the cleanest piece of dramatization in the whole script — but for most of the runtime he's simply a nice, grieving young man doing a job and falling in love, without the revenge plot visibly pressing on him scene to scene. Payton has a genuine, specific want (rebuild trust for her son's sake after a marriage and a death) and gets to argue for it directly. Brandon is the best-drawn character in the piece — specific, unsentimental, funny in ways a child actually is. Rose and Charles, though, exist almost entirely as mechanisms for the ending's reveal rather than people with their own throughline visible before the twist; once you know Charles is a ghost, his earlier scenes read as riddles rather than relationships.
Because I'm gonna kill the man who murdered my father.p.79 — Dylan's want, stated concretely
I have I child to think about, and he's already gone through enough this past year.p.95 — Payton's want stated in her own words (also a typo — 'I' for 'a')
So I can buy back my daddy.p.74 — Brandon given a specific, ungeneric child's logic rather than generic cuteness
The best material has genuine voice — Nick's newsstand banter lands because it's specific and has rhythm, not because it's explaining anything. Elsewhere the dialogue tips into pure function: characters tell each other, and us, what to feel about Rose or Charles rather than the scene showing it. The 'Sexy Girl' bookstore scene reads dated and thin next to the rest of the script's tone. Comic bits are occasionally reused rather than built on — the Dickens/Dickinson mix-up happens twice with no new information the second time.
I used the "F" word.p.60 — a genuinely funny, character-specific comic beat
Dickens--Dickinson who gives a shit?p.24 — the joke used a second time nearly verbatim at the newsstand nineteen pages later
God, what is she, like your mother?... Seems like a bitch...p.41 — flat, generic 'obstacle' dialogue that doesn't sound like a specific person
The revenge plot and the guardian-angel device are both familiar shapes on their own — a returning veteran hunting his father's killer, a dead parent watching over their child in disguise, a killer spared because his own child interrupts the moment. What isn't familiar is the way the script uses Great Expectations as a literal template: Charles hands Dylan the novel and tells him to study his surroundings, and forty pages later the surroundings turn out to be an actual Miss Havisham room, complete with the wedding table under dust. That's a piece of structural invention specific to this script and worth protecting. The ending's double-ghost reveal (Charles/John, Nick/Michael) is a clever idea in principle — two dead husbands quietly steering the living — but it's executed with the same visual literalness ('something supernatural begins to happen') as a much less ambitious film, which undersells how good the underlying idea is.
Might benefit you to study your surroundings.p.24 — the literary clue planted early
A fine china place-setting for two and a silver candle centerpiece under a thick coating of dust and cobwebs.p.105 — the clue's literal, well-engineered payoff
TIGHT ON / Nick's hand as something supernatural begins to happen.p.113 — a strong underlying idea delivered as flat instruction rather than filmable image
The prose is generally clean and readable, and some images are genuinely strong — Rose's frozen room is the best-written passage in the script. But there are recurring soft spots: interior states are frequently told rather than shown ('Torment and rage show in his eyes'), several scenes exist mainly to repeat a joke shape already used (the bookstore customer-confusion gags), and the ending states its own supernatural mechanics in stage direction instead of finding a way to show them. There are also a handful of small continuity slips — 'let's' for 'lets,' a stray '(COV.O.)' tag, 'I have I child' — that a clean pass would catch; none of them are serious, but there are enough to notice.
Torment and rage show in his eyes.p.78 — interior state told rather than dramatized
then let's the pillow fall back downp.2 — a typo (should be 'lets')
YOUNG DYLAN (COV.O.)p.10 — a malformed dialogue tag
This is a hard package to sell on genre alone: the opening promises a police-shooting crime drama, the bulk of the film is a low-key bookstore romance, and the ending commits fully to angel-fantasy sentiment. Each of those audiences exists — faith-based/family drama, gentle adult romance, guardian-angel weepies in the Ghost or Return to Me vein — but they're not the same audience, and a poster or trailer would have to choose one and undersell the others. There's no action, no genre hook, and no starry high concept to carry it commercially; it would need to find its home as a faith-adjacent or streaming-drama title built around two grounded lead performances rather than as a theatrical wide release.
Dylan removes a 9MM HAND GUN. His service revolver.p.98 — the crime-thriller register the marketing might lean on
John takes Rose's hand and together, as husband and wife, they walk into the glow of eternity.p.110 — the faith/fantasy register that sits uneasily alongside it
Keep Dylan's revenge plot alive on the page throughout the middle act instead of letting it go dormant for sixty pages — right now the film reads as a bookstore romance with a revenge plot bolted onto each end, and the fix is to make the two halves press on each other scene by scene rather than resolve in sequence.
Re-thread the Peter Pierson revenge plot through the middle act so it recurs every few scenes instead of disappearing between roughly page 14 and page 76 — a phone call from Roy, a near-miss sighting, a decision Dylan almost makes and doesn't — so the stalking sequence in Act 3 feels like an escalation rather than a reintroduction.
Without this, the revenge plot and the romance plot read as two separate scripts rather than one story under pressure
Pages 14-76, all Rose/Charles/Nick/Payton material
Decide whether the film's spine is the revenge plot or the family-secret/afterlife plot, and rebuild the last twenty pages so one climax feeds the other rather than the two resolving back to back and separately.
Currently the aborted murder and Rose's death/ghost reveal are two unrelated endings placed next to each other; the film needs one
Pages 99-115
Plant two or three concrete, visual or behavioral clues that Charles and Nick are not what they appear — beyond the newspaper joke — so the final reveal recontextualizes earlier scenes instead of simply surprising the reader.
The ending currently asks for a leap the middle hasn't earned
All Charles and Nick scenes throughout
Cut the repeated Dickens/Dickinson joke and the 'Sexy Girl' bookstore scene, or give them each a new beat instead of restaging the same gag shape.
Repetition without escalation reads as filler in a script that already has pacing problems
Pages 22-24, 41-43
Replace 'tell' stage direction ('Torment and rage show in his eyes,' 'something supernatural begins to happen') with specific, filmable physical behavior.
These are the moments the film most needs to convince visually, not narrate
Throughout, notably pages 78 and 113-114
Commit to what kind of film this is in the opening pages and align tone accordingly, so the cop-shooting cold open doesn't read as a bait-and-switch for the bookstore romance that follows.
Clarifies audience expectation and marketing positioning
Pages 1-20
Whether the tonal shifts between crime drama, romance, and supernatural fantasy play smoothly is a directing and tonal-calibration question that depends on choices not fully visible on the page; the same is true of whether the central Dylan/Payton chemistry lands, which depends on casting and performance.
This report was written by Script 360's AI coverage.
Upload a screenplay and get one of your own — scored, evidenced, and quoting your own pages back at you.
Try it on your script