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No Reason

Project Overview

Genre: Drama/ Thriller
Setting: London
Logline: Ordinary London office worker Malory Flesher becomes involved in a series of disturbing incidents and as his life begins to fall apart he decides to confront the horrors of the world...
Summary: No Reason reflects contemporary society as we are taken on a journey through the mindset of a seemingly ordinary man who, after a series of traumatic incidents, decides to take drastic action and right the world's wrongs. Is Malory Flesher a deranged killer or a victim of the world he lives in?
Executive Producer: Christopher Figg
Producer: Rebecca Long
Directors: Alexander Holt & Lance Roehrig
Writer: Mark Underwood

Synopsis

In the city, living in denial and avoiding the truth are things we have all become adept at; part of our daily routine consists of failing to help our fellow man and turning a blind eye to unpleasant situations.

Malory Flesher is a quiet man who lives a mundane and ordered life in a single flat in London. Something of a voyeur, he watches others lives through his window and observes people out in the streets. Every morning he drinks his coffee and waits for Sally Edmead (the girl upstairs) to pass his door before he leaves, so that he may exchange a few words with her on the way down. Sally, while not beautiful like those girls in the movies, has something magnetic about her. She enjoys her little chats with Malory and likes flirting with him. Though they know little of each other's lives there is an attraction between them.

As they leave their building they go their separate ways, Sally goes to teach at a secondary school and Malory to the Turkish Restaurant where he buys a second coffee for his journey to work. Malory suspects this restaurant to be run by the Turkish mafia. One of the guys here, Fikri, lives above the shop in a flat opposite Malory's. Malory has seen Fikri posing in the mirror with a gun. No such excitement for Malory however, he's a number cruncher in a dreary office. But on one particular day things in the office change...

Bacia, a Ugandan girl from IT has killed herself, supposedly because she neglected to buy the office syndicate lottery ticket. That particular week the office would have won. But while everybody else is terribly blasé about Bacia's death and frankly more concerned with missing out on £6648.56 tax free, Malory seems affected by her death. Still, the world keeps turning and Malory carries on regardless.

One night he discovers Sally has a fiancée, Jason, a doctor. The floor drops from beneath him.

Still, the world must keep turning and Malory carries on regardless.

However Malory then discovers that Bacia was pregnant when she committed suicide, and all his boss seems to care about is for Malory to take Bacia's job, Malory quits.

As far as Malory is concerned, the World is worthless and can turn without him.

Malory gets very drunk and decides to go find Jason, Sally's fiancée to see what is so incredibly great about him, But as he stands on the steps of the hospital where Jason works, even in his drunken state he realises this is a bad idea and walks away. However, when he sees a mindless idiot threatening a woman in the street, he cannot let the world turn without him and plucks up some courage to attempt to intervene - and promptly ends up in hospital.

When Malory regains consciousness, he meets Patience, a little girl who is going to die very soon because there is no available heart donor.

The world keeps turning, turning bleaker and more unpleasant.

As fate deals blow after blow, killing loved ones, punishing the good and rewarding evil, Malory rails helplessly against it, until he snaps and decides to do fate's job for it.

Why should he stand around watching violence, hate and discrimination?
Why should unseen forces decide who lives and who dies?
Why should someone else do the killing when he can do it himself?

Directors' Vision

No Reason is what Falling Down was to the early '90s and what Taxi Driver was to the late '70s. The film appraises the state of our national disease in a manner that goes far beyond what economic indicators tell us.

Within this gritty, disturbing, nightmarish modern script we will examine alienation in urban society combining elements of film noir, the western, horror and urban melodrama film genres. We will draw on iconic works like Scorsese's Taxi Driver, John Ford's The Searchers, Meuller's The Assassination of Richard Nixon and even Fincher's Se7en. We will also embrace the styles of seminal British Directors like Ken Loach, Mike Leigh and Shane Meadows.

In many ways, the film has prophetic elements and mirrors the violence of contemporary news headlines. Other misfits have emerged as lonely and disturbed individuals who act out their killer impulses on high school campuses or in terrorist acts. Ultimately we must create a work that convincingly portrays a man cut out of society who has only the slightest connection to normality before finding it eroded away.

The script is brilliant because the detail is engaging but it is this descent into a very modern type of madness that drives the film forward. Malory has just enough about him that is recognisable that it makes it so easy to go along with the rest of his madness. It is not a film to morally uplift you but one that is depressingly fair. There is no redemption in this modern world and although it appears that the violence at the end somehow redeems Malory in reality by showing "society" accepting his action (in that the world keeps turning without recognising our own wrongs) it drags the rest of us down nearer the world that he hates and has become part of.

Whilst filming we must inject a real understanding of the place and a real sense of foreboding into even the earliest scenes. We will achieve this by inserting choice of scene and shot complimenting the script depicting Malory descending into madness. We will use jump cuts, expressionist lighting, point of view shots and slow motion to reflect the protagonist's heightened psychological awareness. Much of the framing needs to feel emotionally claustrophobic, while hand-held sequences make the audience an unwilling, unwitting voyeur. This script needs every area of filmmaking to emphasise genuine interplay between actors, to the point where some scenes in the film appear unscripted. Humour also makes a significant contribution to the film's authenticity and serves a dual purpose. Humour provides a respite for audiences as they deal with the taxing issues raised. Without levity, the grim narratives would feel as false and distanced from reality. Visually, we want to adopt an unobtrusive style that depicts events in a naturalistic, yet pictorial manner.

Malory's sense of mission and urgency is channelled to the viewer with a direct yet subtle rhythm created by careful shot selections and sequencing. Throughout this picture, the endless motion of the camera is a distinct part of the fabric of Malory's world as it appears to move along at a pace that is directed by him. The filming must never seem gimmicky and must be achieved with elegant editing. The scenes hum with a slow burning intensity and gradually build up a momentum that lunges to the film's explosive final act. Initially it must allow the audience to laugh and get drawn in by Malory's character, and then flip them, getting very tense and very silent as the film moves toward the end.

This is not a film to cause the incidents in Colombine, or Virginia, or Dunblane, or wherever you care to look, even with all of its disturbing images of violence. The film tries to understand why these things happen and what pushes man beyond the edge of reason. It is a lesson in the dangers of unchecked Messianism and the urge to cure a sick world.