Motion Pre-production 1: The Clean Life

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Logline -In his pursuit of justice a young police officer learns the confusing nature of good and evil and changes his focus from avenging the past to healing the future.

Synopsis - An old homeless man had taken his grandson, HANK, from his drug addicted daughter and the old man and the boy lived on the streets in a big city. One evening his grandfather was gone and the boy didn't know what to do. He went to the police and even though there was blood in the doorway where they usually slept, the police did not investigate, listing his grandfather as missing and getting Hank into foster care. Hank believed that it was because of their extreme poverty that the police took little interest in the case. Hank determined to become a police officer and serve disadvantaged communities. That dream, and the determination to find his grandfather's murderer, (for he was convinced his grandfather had been killed and did not abandon him), motivated him through the long years of school and the police academy.

Hank is now a police officer and patrols a business district with his partner PHILIP. One particular moonless night, on their last round, they see the lights in CLEAN LIFE dry cleaners are flickering. They go to investigate and find a BEAUTIFUL LADY present who flirts with them. Philip, who is married, flirts back, but Hank wants to leave so they can complete their patrol. Though he has just joined the force and is currently working as a patrolman, Hank longs to become a detective, so after his work shift he goes through missing person cases, trying to find similarities with his grandfather's case. As they leave the dry cleaner, Philip "forgets" his hat so that he will have to return later. When they wrap up their shift Hank goes into the precinct to compare and contrast the various missing person files he is sorting through while Philip returns to Clean Life dry cleaner to retrieve his hat.

When Philip arrives at the dry cleaner he peers through the window and sees the beautiful lady undressing. He enters and she seductively continues to undress. But then she takes off more than her clothes, peeling off her skin and revealing a skeletal monster. The monster's ribs separate and a purple smoke wafts out, taking the form of a hand, it grabs Philip and pulls him inside the terrifying maw. There is the sound of screams and breaking bones and the monster spits out the skin of Philip. The monster picks up Philip's empty skin and hangs it up with the other items in the dry cleaner which are now recognizable as skins. The monster labels Philip's skin "Cleaned Unfaithful" and then shuffles through the many skins and chooses one labeled "greed". The monster pulls this skin of an old beggar off the rack, and wear it on.

Hank is finding more and more similarities in the missing person cases and thinks he knows where the murderer might strike next. None of his coworkers believe him. They are dismissive of the cases as missing persons, not murders. But he is determined. After his shift Hank is exploring a darkened alley behind a hospital. A bespectacled doctor leaves and is attacked by the monster which is wearing the skin of an old beggar. Hank witnesses this attack and pulls his gun, but as the beggar looks up he recognizes his grandfather. Hank holsters his gun to rush forward and embrace the old man, but the monster rips off the skin and executes the doctor. Hank stares in horror. The monster looms over Hank and we see his life play out in the monster's eyes: the neglectful and abusive mom, the grandfather taking him out of that situation, Hank's grief at his grandfather's disappearance, foster care, school, and the police academy. The monster is uninterested in attacking Hank and disappears in a cloud of purpose smoke. But there, where the monster stood, is a ring and a pair of glasses. Hank picks up the ring, recognizing it as the wedding ring of his missing partner, Officer Phillip, and looks through the center, seeing Phillip’s sins play out: this man's young wife, his affairs, and her ultimate suicide. The policeman then picks up the doctor's glasses and through the lenses Hank sees the sins of the doctor: his cruelty, and how it cost the life of an impoverished young boy whom the doctor would not treat because he had no money to pay. The glasses and the ring turn to purple smoke and drift down the street. Hank chases after the smoke. 

The smoke wafts through the crack between the doors of the Clean Life Dry Cleaner, and there in front of the door is the hobby horse from Hank's childhood. He picks it up and sees an image of his grandfather discovering the hobby horse in a dumpster and several children coming around to take it away from him. His grandfather strikes at them with the hobby horse and one child falls to the ground and hits his head, blood pours out of the boy's mouth, and the grandfather just runs away. And the scene blurs to a hospital bed, the boy's weeping mother, and then a gravestone. As Hank realizes that his grandfather had killed a child, the hobby horse turns into purple smoke and drifts into the door’s crack. The electric clothes rack begins rotating, carrying those human skins, labeled with their sins, as if moving down into the abyss of hell. 

Hank returns to his desk, pushes all the missing person case files aside, and pulls out a stack of files marked, "abandon children" and "foster care". Hank is free of his obsession with finding the missing, and now wants to focus on helping those left behind, perhaps victims of the missing.

THE CLEAN LIFE is a feature suspense/thriller— rooted in a hybrid of Eastern folk tale

and Western religion in which an upstanding policeman learns there are gray areas between good and evil, forever changing his perspective. The story begins with a series of unsolved missing people cases, leading officer JOHN to investigate a supernatural serial killer, SKELETON, who uses the skin of the previous human sinner to punish the next one. The film will be told in a non- linear fashion, flashing between John’s present day investigations and Skeleton’s past murders.

John blames himself for his grandfather’s mysterious disappearance 13 years earlier. It is

the one case he swore to solve. When John’s partner, BAREN, vanishes under similar

circumstances— missing body, cleaned clothes left at the scene—John believes now is the time to solve it. He immediately looks to a newly opened laundry, The Clean Life, where they had patrolled the night Baren went missing. John’s initial investigations, though, prove fruitless.

Disappointed, John returns to the farm that had been burned down the night of

Grandfather’s disappearance. When John finds his grandfather’s connection to a previous

laundry, in a location near the farm, he digs through the town archives. John finds a disturbing case of a woman attacked 91 years earlier at the same site. Remains were found later at the bottom of a well used by the cleaner, but the identity of the remains was never confirmed. John connects dots and finds that every 13 years, there are missing persons cases and the victims are tied to a laundry. Counting by this pattern, the current year marks the 8th 13-year cycle. John knows more people are in danger. He reports his findings to his CHIEF. But the Chief takes John off the case, saying he is obsessed and seeing clues that don’t exist. Fueled by guilt, John risks his career and steals evidence from the police department to follow his leads to The Clean Life.

In a darkened alley behind The Clean Life, John sees an OLD BEGGAR open his rib cage and devour a DOCTOR then spit out the doctor's skin. When John points his gun at the creature, he finds it is his grandfather. This supernatural manifestation of his grandfather scans John’s eyes then disappears, leaving John a pair of glasses and a ring—the doctor and Baren’s remains— which reveal their sins: Through the doctor's glasses, John sees the doctor’s ruthless gaze on dying patients whose suffering was caused by the doctor's neglect. The wedding ring lets John feel the same pain with Baren’s wife who committed suicided because of Baren’s unfaithfulness. Once the stories are told, the remains dissolve into smoke and float back to The Clean Life. 

Through the glass door of The Clean Life, a figure takes off its skin and hangs it on the carousel, revealing its original skeleton form. As John decides to enter and destroy the creature, the carousel spins, carrying the humans’ skins into the abyss of Hell. The carousel moves, John can then see clearly each skin that passes by: The doctor’s skin labeled “Pride”; Baren’s skin labeled “Lust”; and his grandfather’s skin labeled “Greed”. The recognizable tattoo of abstract plants and money on grandfather's skin lets John re-see what was once vague in his younger memory: The plants that grandfather grew in family farm were opium poppy and ephedra; grandfather’s huge profits came from countless addicts’ lives. Suddenly, John understands that the deaths of his grandfather and the others are the price they must pay for their sins.

As this moment, the Chief and other officers arrive and tell John to back off. Realizing the

foolishness of man's role in assessing good and evil and agreeing with the way the Skeleton punishes sins with sins, John takes his hand off the door handle, lays down his badge and gun, and walks into the darkness.