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THE BLACK PILL
By L.J. Selllers

GENRE: Thriller
LOGLINE:

Lonely brothers seek sex and love by stalking women on workout apps. For one brother, the effort turns out well, but his sibling is rejected and joins a deviant online Incel group and resorts to a desperate act of kidnapping. Their fates collide in a tragic confrontation that forces

SYNOPSIS:

Lonely brothers seek sex and love by stalking women on workout apps. For one brother, the effort turns out well, but his sibling is rejected and joins a deviant online Incel group and resorts to a desperate act of kidnapping. Their fates collide in a tragic confrontation that forces the younger man to choose between the only two people he knows and loves.

The main characters are Sam and Carl Jagger, brothers in their early twenties. They’re both incels (involuntary celibates) who can’t seem to meet or connect with women—but desperately want to. Their mother was mentally ill and raised them in a primitive jungle home in Costa Rica without an education or dental care. So they’re struggling with low-wage jobs, bad teeth, and insecurities. Carl wants to improve his life and find a real relationship, but Sam is more angry and fatalistic.

The script opens with Carl discovering a workout app called Strava, then following a woman cyclist and attempting to meet her by getting into a bike accident. The ploy works. At the hospital, he meets Tessa, makes her laugh, then invites her to have coffee. She surprises him by saying yes. They bond over crazy-mother stories and develop a relationship.

Sam tries to meet a woman that way too, but she rejects him. Frustrated, he joins an online incel group, where men share their rejection stories and hostility toward women. He later gets drawn into a subgroup that brags about sexually abusing and abducting women. In their lingo, getting to that point means they’ve taken the black pill. Inspired by the actions of other Incels, he abducts the woman who rejected him, takes her home, and keeps her captive.

Meanwhile, Tessa and Carl have a bad moment when she finds out he had sort of stalked her. They break up, then get back together, and she tells him she has something she has to come clean about too.

Tessa had hired a surrogate who is now six months pregnant with her baby and the woman is not answering her phone. So Carl and Tessa start looking for Bettina, and Carl starts to wonder if she’s the woman Sam had followed on Strava.

Meanwhile, the FBI has been monitoring the Incel group and sends out an agent to investigate patterns of sexual assaults in several cities, including Sam’s hometown. So there’s a subplot involving an FBI agent tracking the online group.

Carl decides to confront his brother about the missing woman. He drives over, but Sam isn’t home. Carl breaks into the basement and sees that it’s been set up as a captive space, but Sam and Bettina are gone.

Sam had discovered Bettina’s pregnancy, then decided to get rid of her, steal her money, and go back to Costa Rica. Carl tracks Sam to a nearby pond and confronts him. Bettina is still alive and Carl begs Sam to just walk away. But in the end, Carl is forced shoot Sam to save Bettina and the baby. The FBI agent also shows up to help get them all back to safety.

In the final scene, Carl and Tessa sit in a neonatal hospital unit, looking at her baby, who's expected to live. But Sam didn't survive. Bettina is alive and in a coma, but they don’t know what will happen to her. Carl asks Tessa to marry him, promising to be a great father to the baby, and she says yes.

What is compelling about this movie is how two brothers, raised in the same environment can take such different paths—and how social media can greatly improve some lives, while ruining others. So we have a brother who is breaking good while the other breaks bad.

The movie also takes a hard look at the underlying hostility of so many young males. Yet, by giving Carl and Sam a sympathetic backstory, the audience is reminded that everyone has their own private pain.

In addition, the story could also be seen as a warning to young women about their vulnerability in posting their personal information online.

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