First Impressions
Set in a high-end restaurant, First Impressions follows Sienna, a young woman on a “sugar date” with an older man, Scott. As they trade flirtation and control, the dinner becomes a live social experiment — exposing not just the characters’ performances, but the audience’s own judgments. Through fractured voices of onlookers and meticulously composed frames, the film dismantles assumptions about gender, class, and power. When Sienna upends the expected dynamic, it’s not a twist — it’s a mirror held up to everyone watching.
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Jason SomervilleWriter
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Project Type:Short Script
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Number of Pages:12
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Language:English
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First-time Screenwriter:Yes
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Student Project:No
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Brisbane Indie Film FestivalBrisbane, Australia
January 10, 2026
Best Short Screenplay
Jason Somerville is an emerging Australian writer-director whose work explores control, perception, and the lies people live to survive. His short film First Impressions is a psychological drama and social satire that dissects judgement, power, and gender through a single charged dinner. Across his writing — from intimate thrillers to true-crime stories — Somerville’s focus remains constant: characters trapped between who they are and how they’re seen, navigating the quiet violence of expectation and truth.
First Impressions began with a simple question: how quickly do we decide who someone is — and what does that reveal about us?
I wanted to write a story that exposes the audience’s own judgement in real time. The film uses a familiar setting — a restaurant, a date — but reframes it as theatre. Every look, every silence, is loaded with assumption. It’s not about good or bad people, but about the roles we play and the comfort of our own bias.
The script mirrors what drives most of my work: performance, control, and the distortion between appearance and truth. I’m drawn to stories that hold a mirror to the audience and ask them to watch themselves watching.
