SCRIPT SECRETS: Limited Locations Unlimited

One of the things that low-budget producers are frequently looking for are “Contained Thrillers” or “Contained Horror” - stories that take place in one location.

But even producers who aren’t looking for a Contained story are often looking for a limited number of locations - every location means a crew move where you are paying all of those crew members to pack up the trucks and drive somewhere else, and then unpack the trucks and then start setting up things so that they can film. Lots of money spent, not a single foot of film shot. Money that is not on screen? Wasted!

When some people hear “Contained” and “Limited Locations” they think of a small drama with two people in one location talking for 90 pages.

Um, no.

The film needs to sell tickets or downloads or get views in order to make money. People have to want to see it! That means the cost to make it needs to be small, but the audience still needs to be huge. Every year of the print version of Script I covered the American Film Market, where independent and lower-budget films sell to distributors from around the world. An American film makes 70% of its income from overseas - countries that don’t speak English, so all of that dialogue between those two people standing there in one location? Doesn’t work. If the production company doesn’t have the budget for big-name stars? The excitement level needs to be even higher!

So we want to limit the number of locations, but increase the amount of excitement! Our contained movies need to be twice as exciting, visually told, and in a popular genre.

Sounds impossible, right? But if you walk the halls at American Film Market you will see a lot of low-budget films that don’t seem low-budget. Big, exciting stories! The key is to find a story where characters are trapped at one location, where the type of story: Siege, Mystery, and other exciting stories take place at a single location (or a handful of locations) even if the budget was $200 million.

And one actor? No drama! Two actors? Could work. But Three Actors? Enough characters for shifting alliances and double crosses and lots of suspense and twists (even if it’s a drama). Check out 10 Cloverfield Lane (2016) and Oscar nominee Bugonia and The Housemaid (2025) for good examples of three actor contained films. Most of The Housemaid takes place in one house, with a Husband, Wife, and Maid (with a few scenes with the little girl, plus a creepy handyman). Those three characters keep changing sides, and you don’t know who to trust.

Let’s look at two Contained Thrillers from last year, the Oscar-nominated Bugonia and...

Drop (2025)

Written by: Jillian Jacobs and Chris Roach

Directed by: Christopher Landon

Drop is a great example of a contained story that doesn't seem contained. Two main locations with a car chase in between... and both locations are filled with suspense and action and mystery. One location is the protagonist’s house, the other is a restaurant.

Typical Suburban House: Violet (Meghann Fahy) is a single mom who hasn't been on a date since her abusive psycho husband died. She meets a guy online, they get along, and decide to meet for dinner. Her sister Jen (Violett Beane) says she can always bail if the guy is a creep. Fahy’s cute little boy Toby (Jacob Robinson) is torn by having mom not home, but wants her to be happy. This scene introduces all of these characters, gives us some background, and secretly sets up this location and a couple of things that will pay off later in the story - including Toby’s remote control toy car.

The Elegant Restaurant: The dinner date is in this amazing restaurant on the top floor of a Chicago skyscraper - where practically the entire story takes place. This is a set, built on a sound stage, and through the windows we see the Chicago skyline from very high up. That is a “scrim” - a panoramic picture that surrounds the restaurant set, so when we look out the floor-to-ceiling picture windows we see the Chicago skyline and think that they shot it in a real skyscraper restaurant instead of on a set in Ireland (tax credits).

Her dreamy date is Henry (Brandon Sklenar - the husband in The Housemaid), who works in the mayor's office as a photographer... and excuse his clothes, just came from work. His camera is in the bag hanging off the back of his chair. The tension at first is Violet feeling guilty for leaving her son at home, but the date is going great, he’s incredibly handsome and interesting, and they are really hitting it off.

Then her phone buzzes.

Problems with her son? Nope, an app called DigiDrop that allows strangers within 50 feet of you to send a text. Someone in the restaurant wants to play a game... murder your date. They have an armed, masked man inside her house. She checks her home security camera (on her phone), and there he is, waving a gun at her.

An armed intruder in her house. Where her son and sister are.

She has security cameras all over her house, so she can see everything that happens at that location from the restaurant. This allows the story to cut between the two main locations and have action and suspense happening at each. The restaurant has security cameras all over the place, too - so the person texting can watch her every move. She can't call the police. She can't ask for help. They can see and hear her.

This is a great concept for a contained story - everything is either in the restaurant or on the security cameras from her home. The paranoia of having someone you don’t know see everything you do... plus is creeping around your home where your son and sister are asleep? Great suspense!

Because we can’t create visual excitement by changing locations every 2 or 3 minutes like a non-contained film, we need to create more excitement in the story itself. This is where many contained scripts fail - they don’t have enough happening at that single location.

My “Dog Juice” Theory is that all dogs have the same amount of energy, no matter what size they are - from hyper little Chihuahuas to normal Retrievers to big sleepy St. Bernards. So our screenplays need the same amount of excitement no matter what the budget is. If we take away one kind of excitement (changing locations, movie stars, explosions, and car chases), we need to add another kind of excitement... and pick up the pace. More things need to happen.

In order to hit 90 exciting minutes (pages) the task has steps leading up to killing her date, and she tries everything to get out of killing this really nice guy. As the story unfolds, we realize that her date has taken a picture of scandalous criminal behavior in City Hall, and someone in the restaurant wants the camera’s memory card destroyed and the photographer killed. Violet’s crazy behavior makes her date think she might not like him - so she needs to keep the date going, too... without telling him what is going on. More complications and conflict than a big-budget film! And more twists!

To add to the first date element, we have another couple on a blind date in the restaurant, which doesn't go well. This could be what happens between our protagonist and that dreamy date guy. Violet’s erratic behavior, trying to juggle the date and the mystery person within 50 feet of her in the restaurant, threatening to kill her child unless she steals her date’s camera and destroys the memory card inside. The bad first date couple is a great way to show a possible outcome of her date.

Because the person threatening to harm her son is someone in this restaurant, all of the other characters are suspects. People having dinner, drinking at the bar, and the wait staff and bartender, and even the cocktail lounge piano player.

The story could have used three more suspects. There's one main suspect plus a "it could be anyone" montage of faces, but a couple of characters who should have been suspects aren’t suspicious enough. The story needed an Agatha Christie element to ramp up the paranoia and suspense, and make the audience try to figure out who the bad guy was. Instead of the "it could be anyone" shots of various people texting, they needed to give us five suspects and build them up and keep them acting suspicious. Create clues to each, and twists, and use that to ramp up the suspense.

Which brings up all of these supporting characters and extras, which might not be part of your contained story... due to cost factors. This is one of the reasons why even a micro-budget contained story needs three main characters with shifting alliances to keep the story exciting and create a series of unexpected twists, which brings us to...

Bugonia (2025)

Written By: Will Tracy, based on the film Save the Green Planet! written by Jang Joon-Hwan

Directed By: Yorgos Lanthimos

That third character in Bugonia is the neurodivergent Don (Aidan Delbis), who helps his angry cousin Teddy (Jesse Plemons) kidnap the CEO of the Amazon-like company that he works for (Emma Stone) because Teddy believes she’s part of a secret alien invasion. This is more of a standard Contained Thriller, which mostly takes place in the basement of Teddy’s house with these three characters. There are a few scenes upstairs in the house, a few outside the house (Teddy keeps bees - which adds potential conflict), and some scenes at the warehouse where Teddy works plus the office where CEO Michelle works.

Because most of the story takes place in that basement, we need to keep escalating the conflict, heightening the conflicts between the three characters, have more plot twists and reversals and reveals and secrets... and keep the story just as exciting as that big-budget action movie playing in the cinema next door. That isn’t easy!

Bugonia has a series of interrogations and escape attempts by Michelle, and just crazy things that Teddy says and does because he believes she’s an alien spy wearing human skin. Shaving her head because her hair is really an antenna to communicate with the “mother ship”?

A strong, creepy element in this story is that Teddy’s captive is a woman - this builds terror and suspense throughout the story... and also allows the story to examine power dynamics between the sexes. The reason why this film has four Oscar nominations is that it’s more than just a contained thriller. It compares the life of a CEO to the life of her employee, a man used to the patriarchy, having to deal with a female boss, and how people today are rejecting facts and reality for beliefs and paranoid theories.

A contained thriller, just like any other type of story, can deal with larger issues. Drop looks at dating by computer apps - you have never met the person you are going out with, plus how our phones control us now... as well as a character’s secret backstory that’s revealed. Just because you are writing a contained genre story doesn’t mean it can’t be more than that. Part of the “Dog Juice” of both films is that they look at issues that effect our lives.

In Bugonia, our third character, Don, isn’t sold on the whole alien invasion thing and might side with the pretty CEO. Without that character, the film would lose suspense and the chance for the CEO to escape. With only two characters, it might have become monotonous. So, if you can’t have a restaurant full of potential suspects like in Drop? Make sure you have that unpredictable third character! Make sure there are changes in allegiances. Make sure there are twists and turns in your screenplay. Make sure the conflict escalates.

One of the great suspense scenes in the film has a police officer show up at the house looking for the kidnapped CEO, and wanting to look around... while the victim is tied up downstairs and might find a way to make noise and alert the officer. No matter what your contained story is, you need to brainstorm a bunch of conflict and suspense scenes to make sure the story is constantly exciting. You need more exciting scenes when you have fewer locations. Different kinds of exciting scenes. One of the problems with Bugonia is that it became a little repetitive after a while. But when CEO Michelle finally escapes? She discovers something that drastically escalates the conflict.

Because the location is the same, you need new information to keep it exciting. One of the issues with the mystery element in Drop is that the waiter says it is his first day on the job (a clue!), then becomes over-the-top comic relief instead of always being slightly suspicious. That's indicative of the rest of the "suspects" in the story - only one of them seems like a real possibility, and all of the others are obvious red herrings. That removes an element of excitement. Where Bugonia builds excitement on “How will she escape?”, Drop uses “Who in the restaurant is the villain?” Don’t skimp on what makes the story exciting!

Drop also could have used more information about the reason why she is supposed to kill her date. It seems kind of pasted on at the last minute instead of set up earlier. Contained stories often have a lot of plot twists, and a twist is something that has always been true, just revealed at this point. Setting up this twist could have been part of that awkward first date conversation ("How was your day?"). Just establishing these things earlier would have helped. There was a plant and payoff in the story that did several things at once, which I really liked. One of the hurdles you will face with a contained screenplay is that every element of your story becomes more important... and gets more scrutiny by the audience.

Drop has lots of suspense, and I really liked how it used her previous abusive marriage for both plot and character. In a way, this story is about an abusive relationship with that person 50 feet away, demanding that she do everything they say or there will be violence. Like Bugonia, the thriller story in Drop is a metaphor, and that gives it some weight. Entertainment plus.

Some things to consider when you are writing a contained story, no matter the genre.

1) Use the limited locations as part of the story. Have the characters trapped or required to be there. If they have the choice to leave, the audience will wonder why they don’t.

2) Find the most interesting location or type of location. For a Thriller Class, I once made a list of 100 great locations to be trapped that were usually easy to find and use for filming. If almost all of your story is going to happen in one place, pick an interesting place!

3) Find a great high concept that can take place at one location - Bugonia turns a kidnapping into a weird alien invasion conspiracy theory, Drop turns a first date at a restaurant into a political assassination.

4) Heighten the character conflicts. If you have three characters, make sure there are good, juicy conflicts all the way around.

5) More Twists, Reversals, Secrets, Reveals. You need enough fuel to keep the story going for 90 minutes and as exciting as the blockbuster in the cinema next door.

6) What are the props, tools, geography, and other elements of the location that you can use in the story? Make a list! Bugonia uses everything you can find in a basement.

7) Shifting loyalties - how do the relationships between characters change throughout? Check out Disappearance Of Alice Creed (2009) for great shifting loyalties.

8) How will you keep the conflict escalating? Can you create a ticking clock?

9) Is there a threat outside? Keeping them at the location? 10 Cloverfield Lane and the original Assault On Precinct 13 (1976) are great examples.

10) No matter what the genre, is this a page turner? Does it keep the reader and viewer’s interest throughout and deliver a satisfying and unexpected ending?

A Contained story is usually easier to produce and has a small cast, which makes it easier and less expensive to make. They can open doors for you!