Stay With Me
Feature Script • Narrative Design
Logline
A burned-out 30-something returns to her gentrified Bay Area hometown, where she and a group of barely functional witches must stop tech CEOs from using alien technology to become God.
Overview
Stay With Me is a character-driven comedy-drama set in Half Moon Bay, California—a sleepy Bay Area town shaped by quiet wealth, spiritual posturing, and growing uncertainty about what it’s becoming.
The story follows Autumn, an abrasive, usually drunk witch in her late 30s, who returns home after her life falls apart. She reconnects with a group of equally unstable witches, each stuck in their own cycles of unresolved trauma, fractured relationships, and an inability to let go of the past and the version of the future they thought they’d have.
Set among witches, bougie socialites, and a hidden system tied to Silicon Valley and alien technology beneath the town, the story explores how emotional instability—grief, rejection, control—doesn’t stay contained. It drives decisions, fractures relationships, and creates real consequences.
What begins as messy, character-driven conflict escalates as small emotional moments trigger larger shifts. Misinterpretation and vulnerability lead to fracture, as each character responds differently by trying to control the system, submitting to it, or breaking under it.
As those decisions compound, the conflict expands beyond the town and into something much larger, turning personal struggles into forces that reshape both the characters and reality around them.
Tonally, the story moves between humor, darkness, violence, and irreverence, grounded in emotional truth without taking itself too seriously.
Character Focus
Autumn - A late-30s deadbeat trying and failing to rebuild her life after she causes it to fall apart. She avoids responsibility, struggles with control, and carries unresolved trauma from losing her father.
When she loses control, she transforms into something else entirely—a volatile, inherited state that borders on the divine. Her arc centers on understanding what she is, what she could become, and what she needs to let go of to move forward.
Narrative Direction
The story is built around character-driven choices, in which circumstances emerge from how characters respond to one another and to the systems around them.
Emotional decisions have consequences. Small moments escalate. And yeah, sometimes people’s heads get ripped off. What starts between people doesn’t stay there.
As those decisions unfold, they reveal deeper layers of a dark, mysterious world the characters don’t fully understand. Character, emotion, and progression develop together, so the story moves through cause and effect rather than relying on external plot pressure.
Outcome
Developed a feature-length script centered on character-driven conflict and progression.
Established a narrative foundation that can extend into episodic or interactive formats.
Takeaway
Personal decisions don’t just shape relationships; they can escalate into irreversible consequences when the world itself is built on forces people don’t fully understand.