Wolf Like Me

LOGLINE: Hopeless romantic Jack embarks on a European trip that
takes an unexpected turn when he meets the girl of his dreams - an encounter that forces him to confront who he really is.

Jack Specter, a 30-year-old hooked on his romantic visions of the mid-90s, flees to Europe convinced destiny owes him a grand love story. What he gets instead are sweat-stained hostels, the scent of his own desperation, and gets drawn into an Internet subculture of violent misogynists, who coax out the rot already growing in him. Suddenly there's Jill. She's enigmatic, radiant, and always slipping out of sight. Jack follows her to Innsbruck, wobbling between delusional romance and violent fantasy, until one perfect night convinces him he might actually be worthy of love. He passes out before they can do the deed and when he awakens sans Jill again and more hungover he's ever been in his life, he feels at peace. Setting off on his solo hike of the Alps, Jack snaps when he finds Jill again on a mountain trail and strangles her. Panicked, he finds himself stuck on the mountain overnight, abandoned by the gondola staff due to a massive electrical storm, but is perfectly content to crash in the visitors center until the storm passes, feeling in control for the first time in his life.

Except Jill isn’t the manic-pixie-mirage Jack thinks she is - she’s a former teenage assassin bred by a clandestine feminist vigilante program to eliminate men exactly like him. After years of sanctioned slaughter and creeping doubt, she mistakes Jack’s inept sweetness for humanity and lets him get close. Her reward: waking up half-dead on a mountainside, realizing she's allowed her own isolation and exhaustion cause her to misjudge her targets' blaring red flags. All it took was a little manual strangulation and being left for dead to right that wrong and she aims to right it all the way.

Jack wakes in the to Jill dragging him across the floor of a darkened mountaintop café, and their rematch is a violent, grimly funny scramble through storm winds, broken infrastructure, and two people who have finally dropped their masks. Jill almost finishes him - until Jack, running on fear and dumb luck, sends her falling from a gondola. When he recovers, Jack rides his new fame straight into public disgrace. Winding up alone, exposed, and stripped of every delusion, he finally meets the end he was always headed towards, at the end of a very large knife held by the very alive Jill.