Logline
To keep the woman who is leaving him, a man secretly stages the perfect nightmare — one that ends with him saving her. He believes it will bind her to him forever.
SAY MERCY
He gave everyone the word.
Except her.
Synopsis
Nathan Vale creates and sells perfectly staged nights of terror. His clients willingly step into extreme immersive experiences in which every moment feels completely real. There is only one way out: a single word — “MERCY.”
This time Nathan hijacks the whole system for one goal: saving his relationship with Emily. When she flies to Prague to celebrate their first anniversary, she is distant and cold. She is thinking of leaving. Nathan knows it. He can feel it. He is obsessed with the idea that their love is missing just one thing — an extreme experience that would weld them together and bind Emily to him. He believes real love always leaves. Manufactured love stays. So he rigs their reunion from the very first moment. Emily slowly warms up and suggests, herself, that they spend a romantic night at a medieval castle. She has no idea she is walking willingly into a trap.
Emily is enchanted. The medieval atmosphere, the costumed staff, the luxurious room and the exquisite dinner all win her over. Then their stay turns into a hunt. Emily is desperate, begging for help. But everyone watches her suffering with admiration, convinced she is only acting and knows the word that would end it. She doesn’t. Nathan gave it to everyone but her. Paradoxically, he becomes the only person Emily trusts. He protects her, suffers with her and leads them both through a series of extreme ordeals. When Nathan “kills” one of the pursuers, it is completely real to Emily. Their shared guilt is meant to become a bond that can never be broken.
At the height of the performance, Emily disappears. She drops off the route, and no one on Nathan’s team can find her. For the first time all night, Nathan loses control — he is no longer searching for a client, but for the woman he refuses to lose. His colleague Tara realizes what is happening and tries to stop him. Nathan reaches Emily anyway. He finds her broken and once again takes on the role of her rescuer. But as they escape the castle, the line between staged and real violence is erased for good: Nathan attacks his own people, and there is no way back.
Nathan is convinced he has won — that he has bound Emily to him. But in the hotel room, he realizes how perfectly wrong he was.
The full treatment is registered with the U.S. Copyright Office and available on request.
“Real love always leaves.Manufactured love stays.”
— Nathan
The Film
- Genre
- Elevated psychological horror thriller.
- Comparables
- With audiences and festivals alike, it sits alongside films such as Ready or Not (2019), The Invisible Man (2020) and Obsession (2025): genre films with an auteur signature and a social subtext — power, control and the illusion of a relationship.
- Audience
- Primarily 18–45, drawn to quality psychological horror and thrillers with an auteur edge.
- Concept
- An easily pitched high concept built around a single word that ends it all; the universal theme of a toxic relationship will reach viewers beyond the genre too.
- Festivals
- Sitges, Fantastic Fest, TIFF Midnight Madness, KVIFF.
- Production
- A single dominant location — a Czech castle — delivers high production value. A compact cast and two strong lead roles make for a focused production with a manageable budget.
- Language
- English — opens the way to international distribution and streaming platforms.
SAY MERCY builds its tension on atmosphere, psychology and a growing sense that something is wrong — not on gore for its own sake. The monster isn’t under the bed; it’s the partner lying next to you.
In its first half, the film runs on dramatic irony: the audience knows how the staging works; Emily does not. As in The Truman Show (1998), we follow a protagonist trapped in a reality that everyone around her keeps alive. SAY MERCY carries that form into a horror film about coercive control.
The story rewards a second viewing — knowing the ending, the viewer discovers a second film hidden inside the first.
Creator
David Kočár
Czech director, editor and screenwriter with more than twenty years of experience across feature, commercial, and documentary production.
David Kočár is a Czech director, editor and screenwriter with more than twenty years of experience across feature, commercial, and documentary production. His most prominent recent work includes the large-scale, award-winning music video Christmas Truce for Swedish metal band Sabaton. Alongside directing, editing and producing, he works as a story consultant on colleagues’ feature films, mainly in the final stages of the edit – most recently on Osamělý vlk (Lone Wolf). In commercials and online campaigns, he has produced and directed for brands including BANDI VAMOS, GrandOptical, Next, Eurolines and Sephora. He is now turning his focus back to his own feature film projects.
Contact
davidkocar@gmail.com
Prague, Czech Republic