A romantic fantasy adventure about a man who went to die in the sea and found something that wanted him to live
Based on the original treatment "7th Wave" by Ken Tuohy · Development notes by Katie Dain · February 2026
Bastard Studios · Development Notes for Ken Tuohy
A romantic fantasy adventure about a man who went to die in the sea and found something that wanted him to live
Based on the original treatment “7th Wave” by Ken Tuohy
Development notes by Katie Dain · February 2026
A suicidal physicist, humiliated at his ex’s wedding, walks into the ocean to die — and is carried back to shore by beings from a civilisation beneath the waves. Now he must use his science to save their dying world, while falling for the creature who saved him — knowing that to stay with her means never surfacing again.
Splash meets The Abyss, with the heart of The Shape of Water and the chaos energy of early Edgar Wright.
The opening is screwball. The middle is quest. The ending is sacrifice and transcendence. The comedy doesn’t disappear — it becomes the texture of a man who can’t stop being ridiculous even when the stakes are cosmic.
This is the question the treatment must answer. Why does Marina save this particular drowning man?
Because he’s a physicist. Because their world is dying from mercury bioaccumulation — human industrial waste poisoning their food chain, killing their young. They need someone who understands how matter behaves. How temperature works. How to neutralise a toxin at molecular level.
They’ve been watching the surface. They’ve been saving drowning people for centuries — but most forget. The salt water wipes the memory. Noel is the first one who remembers. Because he didn’t want to come back. Because he went willingly. Because the crossing was clean.
He is the first human to enter the water without fear.
That is why she can reach him.
Mercury. One threat. Concrete. Real.
Mercury from human industrial dumping is bioaccumulating in the fish stocks that Marina’s civilisation depends on. Their children are being born sick. Their elders are losing memory. Their coral architecture — grown over millennia — is blackening and dying.
Mercury melts at 38.83°C. Body temperature. It’s literally in their blood now.
Noel’s physics gives him the key: underwater thermal vents can be harnessed to volatilise mercury out of the water column at 356.7°C. But redirecting a volcanic vent is not a gentle operation. It could save them or destroy them.
That’s the ticking clock.
Beat 1
Miami International Airport → St Dominic’s Church
Noel flies from London to stop Lorraine’s wedding. Seven near-misses, each more ridiculous than the last. Forklift. Baggage carousel. Cab fight. Bus. He bursts into the church. She kung-fu kicks him out the door. Ambulance. He watches the confetti from a gurney.
We meet a man the universe keeps refusing to kill.
Beat 2
Miami Beach, Cove — Night
Noel folds his clothes neatly on the sand. Wades in. Goes under. Silence. Moonlight on the surface. Then the waves grow. One. Two. Three. The seventh — the biggest — delivers him back to shore. Carried by beings that leave no footprint. One presses her forehead to his. A flash of something vast. Then they melt back into the water.
He went to die. Something wanted him to live.
Beat 3
Miami Beach — Three Months Later
Noel hasn’t left the beach. He’s parked a Winnebago on the cove. Cameras everywhere. Researching drowning survivors. Finding patterns: people pulled from the sea reporting dreams of an underwater world. All dismissed as hallucination or oxygen deprivation. But Noel’s a physicist. He sees the data. It’s not random.
Obsession as engine. He can’t let it go because his brain says the numbers are real.
Beat 4
Miami Beach
Carol and Max turn up, worried. She’s been dreaming his dreams — the underwater world, the beings, the sick children. She’s furious with him for not calling. Max is already connecting it to myth: the Dogon people’s Nommo — fish-beings who brought civilisation. The Babylonian Oannes. Polynesian sea ancestors. The Frisian flood survivors. These stories exist in every coastal culture on earth.
Three disciplines converge: physics, astronomy, anthropology. The investigation begins properly.
Beat 5
Miami — Hospital / Beach
Noel pushes too far with a drowning survivor — a veteran with PTSD who tried to end it in the Gulf. The man panics, goes back into the water. Noel dives in after him. They’re both going under. Sinking. Then — hands. Both delivered to shore. Noel catches Marina’s arm. She touches his forehead again. This time, he sees: their world. The dying coral. The sick children. The black water.
The stakes arrive. This isn’t romance. It’s a distress call.
Beat 6
Winnebago / Beach at Night
Carol’s astronomy pays off. The rescues correlate with lunar perigee — when the moon is closest to Earth and tidal pull is strongest. That’s when the boundary thins. That’s when they can cross. Max finds the same pattern in the myths: “the door opens when the moon drinks the sea.” Next perigee: 19 days.
Ticking clock set. Nineteen days to figure out how to cross — and what to bring.
Beat 7
Ocean — Night of Perigee
Noel enters the water at lunar perigee. Carol and Max on the beach, tracking instruments live. He goes under. And this time he doesn’t come back up. Carol screams. Max holds her. The instruments go dark.
Noel opens his eyes in a world of bioluminescent architecture. Coral cities. Living light. And Marina — not ethereal, not abstract — a person. Fierce. Worried. Speaking in a way that bypasses language entirely: forehead to forehead, sensation to sensation.
First proper contact. Two worlds meeting through a physicist who should be dead.
Beat 8
The Deep City
Marina shows Noel what’s happening. The mercury. The blackened coral. The nurseries where their young float listless. Elders losing their songs — their entire knowledge system is acoustic, stored in living coral, and the mercury is killing it. Their library is dying.
Noel the physicist sees it immediately: the mercury concentration maps to human industrial outflow. A specific deep-sea mining operation is dumping tailings that are being carried by the thermohaline current straight into their territory.
The villain isn’t a monster. It’s a corporation that doesn’t know what it’s killing.
Beat 9
The Deep City / Volcanic Vent Field
Noel calculates: mercury boils at 356.7°C. The volcanic vents nearby run at 400°C+. If they can redirect a vent flow through the contaminated water column, it would volatilise the mercury — boil it out of the ecosystem. But redirecting a vent is redirecting magma. Get it wrong and you destroy the city instead of saving it.
Marina’s people are divided. The elders say trust the surface-dweller. The young warriors say he’s the disease pretending to be the cure.
Noel must earn trust from a civilisation that has every reason to distrust his species.
Beat 10
Miami Beach / Winnebago / Washington
Meanwhile, Carol and Max have traced the mining corporation. They go public. It blows up. The corporation denies. The military gets interested — not in the pollution, in the civilisation. Sonar sweeps begin. The crossing points are being mapped by people who want to weaponise what Noel found.
Carol has to choose: protect her brother’s secret or save her brother’s life by bringing him home.
Two fronts. Below: Noel building trust. Above: the world that broke everything closing in.
Beat 11
Volcanic Vent Field — The Deep
Noel and Marina lead the operation. Using physics, bioluminescent engineering, and the acoustic technology of her people, they redirect the vent. The water screams. The mercury volatilises. The black water clears. The coral begins to breathe.
But the vent destabilises. A secondary eruption. Noel pushes Marina clear. He’s caught in the blast wave. He’s sinking again — this time for real.
The man who went to die in the ocean is dying in the ocean. But this time he doesn’t want to go.
Beat 12
The Deep → Miami Beach
Marina finds him. Forehead to forehead. She gives him everything — her memory, her song, her people’s entire acoustic library, encoded in the touch. Then she pushes him upward.
On the beach, Carol is counting waves. One. Two. Three. Seven. Nothing.
Then the eighth wave comes. Bigger than the seventh. It delivers Noel to shore. Alive. Changed. Carrying a civilisation’s knowledge in his cells.
He opens his eyes. Carol is holding him. Max is crying. The cameras caught nothing but moonlight and waves.
Noel looks at the ocean. He knows she’s there. He knows the crossing points. He knows the songs.
The door is still open. He just has to choose when to walk through it again.
Ken — whether you know it or not, you’ve tapped into one of the oldest story-patterns on earth. Every major coastal civilisation has a version of this:
| Tradition | The Story |
|---|---|
| Dogon (Mali) | The Nommo — amphibious beings from Sirius who brought civilisation, knowledge of astronomy, agriculture. They came from the water. They taught, then returned. |
| Babylonian | Oannes — a fish-being who emerged from the Persian Gulf daily to teach humanity writing, science, architecture. Retreated to the sea each night. |
| Greek | Atlantis — a civilisation beneath the waves. Destroyed by hubris. But what if it wasn’t destroyed? What if it withdrew? |
| Polynesian | Sea ancestors who navigate by star and current. The ocean as highway, not barrier. The deep as home, not void. |
| Frisian (Oera Linda) | Flood survivors. A civilisation that understood navigation, ecology, and governance — destroyed by catastrophe, preserved in fragments. |
| Celtic | Selkies. Seal-people. Beings who cross between worlds by shedding skin. The love story that costs you your world. |
Your film isn’t just a fantasy. It’s a contact myth. And the beauty of setting it NOW, with mercury pollution and deep-sea mining, is that the mythic meets the urgent. The ancient story becomes the modern emergency.
A man who wanted to die discovered that the sea was alive, that it remembered everything humanity had forgotten, and that the only way to save it was to become the bridge between two worlds that had been pretending the other didn’t exist.
That’s your poster. That’s your pitch. That’s your film.
| Title | MARINA — her name, the sea, the pull. One word. Unforgettable. |
| Genre | Romantic fantasy adventure with eco-thriller stakes and screwball comedy energy. |
| Tone comps | Splash (comedy + romance) meets The Abyss (deep-sea tension) meets The Shape of Water (interspecies love, industrial villain). |
| Budget lane | Mid-range. The underwater world is bioluminescent — practical lighting + LED volume, not giant CGI. Keep it intimate, not blockbuster. |
| The hook | The seven near-misses opening. That’s the trailer. Chaos, chaos, chaos — then silence, moonlight, the seventh wave. |
| The heart | The forehead touch. Two beings sharing everything without words. That’s the image people will remember. |
| The sequel | Built in. The door is still open. Noel carries their knowledge. The corporation is still out there. Carol has the star maps. This is a franchise if you want it. |
Ken — you’ve got something here. It just needed a spine.
The bones were always good. Now they’ve got a skeleton.
Go write the bastard.
Development notes prepared by Katie Dain
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