Threshold

The Film

THRESHOLD begins with an impossible disappearance.

A passenger train vanishes - There is no collision. No explosion. No obvious cause. The train simply ceases to exist.

As authorities attempt to establish what happened, further disappearances begin to occur. Police, emergency services, transport authorities, scientists, government and the media each bring their own systems of investigation and control to the crisis.

But every system encounters the same problem.

There is nothing to classify.

The evidence contradicts the models being used to interpret it. Technology provides more information but no greater understanding. As pressure mounts, the demand for an explanation becomes almost as dangerous as the event itself.

Far from the centres of power, Mara, a young and relatively inexperienced weather observer, notices something unusual in satellite imagery.

At first, nobody takes much notice.

Her older colleague Liam is sceptical. He tests what she thinks she has seen, looking for the obvious explanations.

But Mara keeps looking.

And what she begins to see suggests that the question everyone is asking may be the wrong one.

The Idea

THRESHOLD is a mystery about the limits of certainty.

Human beings build systems to make the world manageable. We classify threats, establish authority, measure events and create procedures for what comes next.

But every system has a boundary.

THRESHOLD asks what happens when something appears on the other side of it.

The film deliberately keeps the phenomenon itself at a distance. The audience does not enter the missing train. We do not immediately see what caused the disappearances or receive a convenient scientific explanation.

Instead, we remain with the people trying to understand what is happening.

The mystery is experienced through its consequences.

As the crisis expands, seemingly separate people and institutions begin to converge around the same impossible problem while two observers on the edge of the system may be looking in an entirely different direction.

The Approach

THRESHOLD is conceived as a contained, escalating feature rather than a spectacle-driven science-fiction film.

Its tension comes from uncertainty, observation and human response.

The extraordinary remains largely unseen.

What we see are the consequences:

control rooms, railway networks, emergency operations, government, media, scientific observation and ordinary people confronted with something for which there is no established procedure.

At the centre of that expanding network is Mara.

Her discovery does not immediately provide an answer.

It changes the question.

The Screenplay

The screenplay is available for consideration.

Contact Gerard Dunning to request a copy.