To say I’m a movie guy is an understatement. Since I was roughly as tall as E.T., I’ve been into them. That passion brought me into a career as a film critic, as well as a career as a screenwriter.* I want to watch the damn things and make the damn things as much as humanly possible.

As a result, I’ve learned a few things. One piece of screenwriting wisdom is written on a 3×5 card that’s taped to my desk. I can’t credit the original writer who passed it on as I don’t recall who shared it with me, but I’ll share it with you verbatim:

After the opening scene, each scene should…

• Be caused by the previous scene

• Cause the next scene

• Build conflict
• Contain one great visual or moment

Following those rules** won’t help me write an Academy Award winning script, or craft the kind of project that Tom Cruise would eagerly sign on to. They do help to make a script flow in a more logical and interesting way. Watch enough movies and you’ll see an awful lot of them use variations of these rules. It also means when a script doesn’t follow them, it’s glaringly obvious. Case in point is the new Australian erotic thriller Bitter Desire.

We’re introduced to Steve (Nathan Hill), a cop in hot pursuit of the cold-blooded criminal Andrew (Tass Tokatlidis). Andrew gets the drop on Steve, and proceeds to pummel the living hell out of him with a crowbar. Fortunately for Steve, another cop arrives on the scene. Steve survives and Andrew is thrown in the clink. All’s well that ends well, right?

Yes and no. On the one hand, as an Australian police officer, Steve must have an outstanding health care plan. He’s convalescing at home, and his home health care aide Harmony (Hao Dao) comes by daily to handle his physical therapy. Steve’s wife Lexi (Shar Dee) sees nothing untoward about this arrangement. Why would she? Despite a grueling corporate job, she’s got a great relationship with her hubby. 

Andrew, on the other hand, does not have a great relationship with Steve. You see, he’s pretty pissed about cooling his heels in the cooler. He wants revenge, and weirdly, not on the cop who actually held him at gunpoint and arrested him. Andrew has a plan to a) destroy Steve’s life, b) kill Steve, or c) a and b.

You’re probably thinking to yourself that Andrew has a fiendishly complex plan to annihilate Steve. Not so much! Andrew is a big fan of Thoreau’s quote, “Simplify, simplify, simplify.” His plan, such as it is, is for his girlfriend Sasha (Diana Benjamin) to pose as Steve’s home health care aide. Once she’s infiltrated Steve’s life, Sasha is ordered to use her feminine wiles to ruin Steve’s life before ending it. But will she?

So…look. Bitter Desire is not a very good movie. It doesn’t help that director Simon Oliver has a budget that’s smaller than the cost of craft services on Avengers: Endgame. The lighting is flat, the majority of the action is confined to a very appealing upscale suburban house,*** and the action scenes are stiffly blocked. On top of that, there are multiple shots of the exterior of the house, the interior, and lingering shots as people walk towards and away from the camera. My initial thought was that Oliver was padding the feature as much as possible to drag the film over the finish line to be considered a feature.**** But I don’t think that’s right. Instead, my gut tells me that Oliver was dealing with a severely underwritten script. He had to do whatever he could to finish the damn thing.

To me, the screenplay by Thomas Bodine is the foundational problem. I’m willing to dismiss oddities like a backyard shooting range in the suburbs, or a prison guard studiously ignoring a prisoner loudly making plans for revenge. Let’s refer back to a few of the rules I mentioned, and one of them is building conflict. With the conflict between Andrew and Steve, has Steve been chasing Andrew long? Have they developed an adversarial relationship prior to this? Has Steve thwarted Andrew before and this is the moment where Andrew finally breaks? The script won’t tell us. Speaking of conflict, is Sasha conflicted? Is she starting to fall for Steve? Does she want to bump off Lexi and take her place? Does she have another agenda entirely? The script won’t tell us. On top of that, with each scene being caused by the prior scene and causing the next scene, we should feel escalating tension. This being an erotic thriller, the genre demands plentiful amounts of skin and escalation tension. Sure, there’s some gratuitous nudity here, but not so much with the tension. We should feel Steve getting squeezed, either with a growing attraction to a woman he shouldn’t be attracted to, or a growing realization that things are going pear-shaped. Instead, things happen haphazardly, and a few scenes fly in from out of nowhere.****. Then there’s a stiffly choreographed fight, then someone gets shot in the head, then credits roll and…that’s it? The core idea of this script isn’t bad, and in principle, I have nothing against erotic thrillers. But it needed a few serious passes to improve the structure, up the tension, and enhance the characterization.

As a result, the cast does what they can with a script that won’t help them. I liked the quiet chemistry between Shar Dee and Nathan Hill. They feel like a couple in a lived-in relationship. With Dee, I also liked how she sells Lexi’s exhaustion, overwork, and dawning realization that there’s something rotten in Melbourne. I’ve seen Nathan Hill’s work before, and he does good work playing a nice guy with easygoing charisma****** gradually dragged into a not nice situation. As Andrew, Tass Tokatlidis is given nothing to do beyond spout threats and look mean. The performer who’s let down the most by the material is Diane Benjamin as Sasha. There are a few moments where she shows us her character’s calculating intelligence. Yet Benjamin has so few opportunities to dig in, to show us someone who’s a force of nature or someone who’s in just as deep as Steve is. With a little luck, she’ll work on a project that gives her material worthy of her.

I don’t want to trash anybody’s work. I do want filmmakers, when they have a relatively rare opportunity to make a feature, to do more than swing for the fences. This business is hard. It attracts adversity. I love it when someone triumphs over it all, and delivers a film worthy of their best efforts. Bitter Desire isn’t that film, but I got fingers and toes crossed that their next film is.

*The faint whirring you hear is the sound of my father rolling in his grave at hypersonic speed.

**Like any other business, this “rule” in screenwriting is only a rule until it isn’t. Plus, every writer does things a little differently and has their own rules they adhere to.

***Which, hilariously, has a shooting range in the backyard!

****A little research taught me that most organizations consider a movie to be feature length if it’s forty minutes or longer. The Screen Actors Guild doesn’t screw around with their eighty minute requirement.

*****These would be the random scenes at Lexi’s office where her co-workers discuss what’s happening between her and Steve.

******I’m reminded of The Silent Partner, a movie where the non-classically handsome Elliott Gould mysteriously is a sex god who has multiple women throw themselves at him. As the kids say, that’s rizz.

Tim Brennan Movie Critic

Tim has been alarmingly enthusiastic about movies ever since childhood. He grew up in Boulder and, foolishly, left Colorado to study Communications in Washington State. Making matters worse, he moved to Connecticut after meeting his too-good-for-him wife. Drawn by the Rockies and a mild climate, he triumphantly returned and settled down back in Boulder County. He's written numerous screenplays, loves hiking, and embarrassed himself in front of Samuel L. Jackson. True story.