Genre: Feature Film, Psychological thriller

Written and Directed by Elan Gamaker
Produced by Bridget Pickering
Status: Script Development, Raising Finance

South Africa, 1986. A national state of emergency has just been declared. Life on the streets of the city has just gone from bad to extremely dangerous. But all struggling actress PATIENCE DUMISA (29) wants to do is concentrate on her career. For her mother, MANDLAKAZI DUMISA (55), a highly politicised domestic worker, the announcement is a call to action for her and her fellow revolutionaries. As she heads off to attend street protests, she insists that, for the sake of the household income, Patience must work in her place. Patience must scrap an audition to stand in for her as babysitter at the home of her employers, the Willow family. After resistance, Patience acquiesces.

She leaves behind her own daughter NOMBULELO (12) and heads into the suburbs to meet her mother’s employers: security products salesman TREVOR WILLOW (45). Then she meets the children to be put in her care: conniving, inquisitive, pre-pubescent ANNIE (12) and sensitive, bedwetting JORDAN (6). The third child, from Trevor’s first marriage, is BEN (18). He is currently away doing his military service in the Angolan border wars.

Patience is given a guided tour of the house and shown its ins and outs. Room by room we discover the succession of barriers set up to keep the house safe as Trevor, using his own home as the model for his booming security business, grills Patience to see if she is up to the job. Patience then meets Trevor’s wife, French emigré DOMINIQUE (34). Dominique is like Patience: a woman of glamour and big dreams, and also forced to leave her children to the South African night. She leaves, reluctantly, with Trevor for an all-night, sea-bound business promotion aboard the Astor cruise ship in Table Bay.

Dusk sets in. Patience immediately encounters the mysterious gardener PATRICK (33), who is refused entry to the house, and the children, whose disobedience and meanness clash with Patience’s revulsion at work she feels is beneath her. With the kids in bed without bath or dinner and Jesse the family labrador kicked out against the Willows’ wishes, Patience explores the house, indulging in its luxuries.

Then it all starts to go wrong. First: a bloodcurdling scream. Something in the garden is
causing Jesse considerable pain. Patience runs to the source of the noise but the dog has
vanished. Then, even though Patience is under strict instructions from Trevor to ignore his
‘delusional’ wife’s claims and his children’s fears, the fact that there is an intruder can no
longer be denied. Patience is trapped in the house and, with the parents unreachable and
the police unhelpful, she must try to see out the night with the children as the intruder comes ever closer to entry.

But then, when Patience receives a call from her daughter that political troubles back in the township are threatening her own life, she must make a choice: stay in the suburbs to protect someone else’s children or find a way home to protect her own. As the present danger increases so does Patience’s desperation, and as she is forced to employ the security measures enforced by Trevor and despised by Dominique, each in turn has the opposite effect than intended: eventually trapping her.

With the intruder now inside the house and holding the children captive, Patience must put her own needs aside and find a way back into the prison she has spent the night constructing. It will require cunning, sacrifice and something she hasn’t shown thus far: courage…