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Felixtown

Feature | Darma / Comedy / Coming-of=age | 105 mins

Status: Unproduced

Script sample

Logline:

A bitter 13-year-old, exiled for the summer to a seaside town crumbling into the sea, finds his childish fantasies of love and escape shattered, forcing him to discover the complex truths of family, friendship, and romance in a world where everything is temporary.

Synopsis:

FELIXTOWN is a poignant, bittersweet comedy-drama about the summer that awkwardly bridges the gap between childhood and everything that follows.
BEN, 13 and miserable, and in a constant fight with his sister, is dumped, alone, for the holidays in Felixtown, a seaside village where the cliffs, and the houses on them, are crumbling into the North Sea. He’s left with his grandparents, RON and PEARL, a couple who communicate through endless bickering, endless cups of tea, and a terrifying number of cat ornaments.

Trapped and lonely, Ben finds a reluctant ally in CLAY, a local teen whose bravado masks his own isolation. Their friendship is a clumsy dance of stolen beer and grandiose escape plans. Ben’s world shifts when he develops a silent crush on a mysterious girl on the beach, leaving her heartfelt messages scrawled in the sand. To his shock, she starts replying, creating a secret, romantic dialogue.

This personal drama mirrors the decay around him: Ron stages a one-man protest against the council’s demolition of the doomed cliff-top houses, refusing orders to relocate, he defiantly stands with his house, waiting for the cliffs to erode with time. As the summer wears on, Ben learns that his grandparents’ bickering is a deep, weathered love, and a painfully awkward encounter, caught trying to watch an adult movie, shatters his childish view of Pearl forever, seeing her not just as a caregiver, but as a person with a history and desires.

The summer’s illusions collapse. The cracks begin to show. Clay finally gets the dirt bike he always wanted, attracting the attention of the older, cooler kids, and he abruptly ditches Ben. The friendship, built on a foundation of shared loneliness, collapses the moment Clay gets a better offer. The final blow reveals the girl has gone, her family bungalow now empty, and her final message already vandalised and unreadable.

The climax arrives as Ron makes his final, Quixotic stand against a digger. Ben, his heart raw from his double heartbreak, sees not a foolish old man, but someone else fighting a losing battle against the inevitable. In a surge of protective fury, Ben rushes to his grandfather’s defence, physically placing himself with Ron, between their home and the machine. The generational divide closes not in shared victory, but in shared, dignified defeat.

Ben leaves Felixtown as the cliffs continue to crumble. He doesn’t get the girl, his family isn’t fixed, and the town is still dying. His mother picks him up, and he’s reunited with his sister. The childish bickering is gone; they look at each other with the quiet recognition of two people who have aged separately but simultaneously. Ben has learned that goodbyes are inevitable, that love is often expressed through frustration and flawed gestures, and that sometimes, the most profound connections are found not in grand fantasies, but in the shared, silent understanding of sitting on the edge of the world, waiting for it to fall.