When she discovers that her ex-girlfriend’s new dream-streaming service conceals a murderous intention, a brilliant doctor with a pyromaniac past must lead a suicidal attempt to stop her, thwart the ‘hypnocalypse’ – and find redemption for a dark secret from their shared past.

SYNOPSIS:

STREAMWEAVR by Kendall Castor-Perry

Logline: When she discovers that her ex-girlfriend’s new dream-streaming service conceals a murderous intention, a brilliant doctor with a pyromaniac past must lead a suicidal attempt to stop her, thwart the ‘hypnocalypse’ – and find redemption for a dark secret from their shared past.

Tagline: Streamweavr. The media streaming service of your dreams.

Personal connection: Reed Hastings, former CEO of Netflix, boasted: “Our only competition is sleep”. It clicked straight away. What if a company like Netflix could stream directly into your dreams? And then could induce you to be or do anything they programmed. Including murder…

Format: feature.

Genre: psychological technothriller.

Periods: present-day in Seattle with interleaved flashbacks to Yale in1998

Tone: investigational journey; clash of obsessions; seeking redemption for a lethal past error.

Comps: ‘The Net’ and ‘The Circle’ meets ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’ and ‘Dreamscape’

Rating: PG-13, no sex, violence is infrequent, mild and stylized.

Key characters:

• Lauren Merritt (50s) – much-loved CEO of Seattle’s Somnetix, launching the Streamweavr streaming service – media while you sleep. A controlling psychopath who will use this door into people’s brains to reshape society by any means – including programming suicide and murder. Facially disfigured from the inferno that killed deaf sister Melody in 1998.
• Erica Wise (50s) – also deaf, passionate doctor and stem cell researcher whose techniques are ridiculed by the establishment. Trying to suppress her troubled, pyromaniac past. Was in a relationship with Merritt in 1998; attempted a murder-suicide that resulted in Melody’s death – though Erica escaped and was never suspected. Followed Merritt to Seattle.
• Troy Branzino (40s) – brilliant tech inventor, blinded by ‘can I’ over ‘should I’, who developed the brain-control technology used in the Streamweavr system. Deliberately brain-damaged by Merritt for threatening to reveal the evil side of Streamweavr – but not before he left a message for his daughter Jenny – who then dies in a ‘freak accident’.
• ‘Al’ Stanczyck (50s) – Police Detective, closet Meg Ryan fan, signed up as a Streamweavr beta tester, gets dream-programmed to perform murders as the Pyropath assassin by Merritt’s security chief Berg – murders that he’s also trying to solve!
• Will Goldhawk (30s) – out-on-a-limb hothead blogger driven by a conviction that there’s a dark side to Merritt and her Streamweavr plan that must be exposed at all costs.

Conflict/Stakes: Erica’s frustration at the rejection of her research. Awakening of Erica’s guilt about her responsibility in the death of Merritt’s sister when Branzino’s daughter is killed the same way. Can Erica carry through with a crazy plan to achieve retribution for Jenny’s death, redemption for Melody’s and some sort of resolution of her romantic obsession for Merritt?

‘Streamweavr’ shows what may go wrong if we allow high-tech into our heads. But it’s really about the fateful relationship between two brilliant, flawed women whose paths cross once too often.

Key plot / story strands

Doctor Erica Wise is still secretly in love with Lauren Merritt, who dumped her 25 years before. She’s also kept a dark secret, about her role in the fiery death of Merritt’s young sister Melody that resulted in disfiguring burns to Merritt. Erica’s guilt drove her to become a doctor, and now she works on radical – but ridiculed – burn repair research, laser-printing code onto stem cells. With no volunteers for her experiments, she practices on herself. With a big syringe and a blowtorch.

Merritt is now the much-loved CEO of Seattle tech firm Somnetix. She built a shrine, an exact copy of the house in which Melody died, inside hilltop HQ The Cube, its huge, illuminated faces visible for miles. She’s launching Streamweavr, a service that streams content directly into your own ‘dream cinema’. But Merritt’s true purpose is to insert controlling programming during users’ dreams, bypassing their executive control and memory, allowing Merritt to get them to do anything. Blogger Goldhawk suspects this and fears that this ‘hypnotainment’ will lead to the ‘hypnocalypse’.

When high-schooler (and mentee of Erica) Jenny Branzino dies in a car inferno, it’s blamed on the so-called Pyropath, who has already killed two on the East Coast in spectacular fires. Jenny’s father Troy Branzino – now suffering from inexplicable brain damage – was the architect of Streamweavr. He realized Merritt wanted to abuse its mind-programming possibilities. Knowing something dreadful would happen, he left Jenny a message and hid proof to expose Merritt’s malevolent intent. Jenny told Goldhawk, but she was killed before she could recover the proof.

Because Erica knows Merritt – a charismatic, manipulative psychopath – she’s sure that Merritt arranged Jenny’s death and Branzino’s brain injuries, to suppress the truth about Streamweavr. Erica’s past feelings about her failed relationship with Merritt, and her guilt over Melody’s death, return to consume her in recurring fiery visions that intensify throughout the course of the story.

Stanczyck, cheesy-movie-loving detective, is a beta-tester for Streamweavr. He’s struggling to catch the Pyropath – because, in Seattle, it’s him: he’s an amnesiac assassin, programmed through Streamweavr to kill anyone who interferes with Merritt’s plan. Beginning with Jenny.

Erica is enlisted by agent Chadwick who’s trying to acquire Merritt’s memory-bypass technology for the U.S. Government. Via a big syringe through the nose to Branzino’s brain, Erica injects modified stem cells aiming to reverse his brain damage, but it initially seems to make things worse. She is arrested for Jenny’s murder when her past pyromania and apartment full of incendiary devices is discovered. Chadwick pulls strings and gets her released as his ‘pyromania consultant’; he’s furious at her intervention – but it cures Branzino, who realizes what Merritt did to him. And to Jenny.

Erica and Branzino combine their skills in a Hail-Mary scheme to defeat Merritt, to deprogram Stanczyck (who has been programmed to murder Branzino and is following an implanted lucid dream that replaces gloomy Seattle with cartoon-vivid LA in real time) and to avenge Jenny’s death.

Sure that Erica will come, Merritt invites her to visit The Cube. Bound and interrogated, Erica confesses that her botched murder/suicide plan caused Melody’s horrible death and Merritt’s disfigurement. Merritt confides that Melody wasn’t her sister but her daughter, deliberately conceived when she was 13 to entrap her billionaire uncle, whom she then had incarcerated and murdered so she could inherit everything. Erica streams Merritt’s confession directly to millions of Streamweavr users, using Branzino-modified glasses and hearing aids.

Furious, Merritt uses Streamweavr to enter Erica’s mind, to destroy it. But Erica had injected herself with modified stem cells which have turned her brain into a Streamweavr server. Erica traps Merritt’s mind inside her own ‘dream cinema’ in a dream version of the murder-suicide. Merritt’s body dies, while Erica remains in a coma, with dreams of the relationship she longed for.

STREAMWEAVER