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wollet2
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Title: Faceless
Format: Psychological Horror / Neo-Noir / Medical Thriller
Tone: Cold, clinical, slow-burning dread.
Influences: You Were Never Really Here, The Skin I Live In, Safe (Todd Haynes), Caché
DR. ADRIAN VALE – CHARACTER PROFILE
- Age: 47
- Occupation: Maxillofacial surgeon, specialized in post-traumatic facial reconstruction.
- Background: Trained in Switzerland. Former humanitarian surgeon (Médecins Sans Frontières). Now reclusive, living off private wealth and reputation.
- Personality: Withdrawn, ritualistic. Deeply rational, but emotionally cauterized. Speaks precisely, rarely. Keeps a copy of On the Origin of Species and a thick black notebook he writes in with surgical neatness.
- Core Trauma: His younger sister, Eleanor, was psychologically abused and physically assaulted by a man who participated in incel forums. The legal system failed. She died by suicide at 19. Adrian identified the perpetrator, stalked him, and kept his details—but never acted.
SETTING
- A private surgical clinic nestled in the French Alps, outside Annecy. Cold, beautiful, soundproofed. Every room is sound-absorbing white, concrete, and brushed steel. Operating theater is state-of-the-art. He lives upstairs.
THE HOOK
Adrian Vale begins posing as a benevolent surgeon on incel-adjacent forums and boards focused on facial aesthetics, skull symmetry, and “lookism.” He doesn’t interact in a hostile way—he listens. He presents himself as someone who “believes your pain has a physical origin.”
He posts images of anonymized successful jaw surgeries, pseudo-clinical diagrams, even fake research articles. His tone is never mocking—always cold, precise, fatherly.
He selects only a few men: the most desperate, the most misogynistic, the ones who post long screeds about how “women only care about canthal tilt” or “Chads with hunter eyes get everything handed to them.” He notes not only their pathology, but the specific language of blame and entitlement.
He offers them extremely discounted rates. No insurance required. Total discretion.
ACT I – BAIT AND CUT
The first man we follow is Jared, 24, lives in his parents' basement. Pale, thin, very online. Works in IT support. Obsessed with his “low hyoid bone,” “flat cheekbones,” and “weak jaw.”
Adrian conducts a long video consultation—clinical, nonjudgmental.
"This is not about being attractive. It's about being proportional. Nature made errors. I correct them."
Jared flies to France. The clinic is sterile, beautiful, devoid of staff. He is prepped, drugged, and put under. The surgery occurs.
But when he awakens, something is off.
He is wrapped in gauze. He is not allowed a mirror. He is given strict healing instructions. But he notices:
- His lower mandible alignment feels wrong.
- He struggles to swallow.
- His bite has been destroyed—anterior open bite.
- His zygomatic bones feel “hollowed.”
- He cannot close his left eye fully.
Days later, when he insists on a mirror, Vale simply brings him to a steel surface under surgical lights. His face is warped—still recognizably him, but degraded, alien, subtly wrong in every proportion he fetishized online.
Vale doesn’t rage. He calmly says:
“You believed beauty would solve your soul. So I removed it.”
He is left without identity—unable to return home, without money, undocumented, paranoid. His online posts grow erratic. Eventually, he disappears.
ACT II – THE ENGINE
Over the course of a year, Adrian performs six such surgeries—each tailored. Some get:
- Inferior orbital wall trauma, leaving them with drooping eyes.
- Intentional misplacement of titanium plates leading to facial asymmetry.
- Internal scarring that prevents proper facial movement.
Each is left alive, mobile, but irrevocably derailed.
Adrian never touches them outside the clinic. He never says much. He leaves them to process their broken reflections alone. They were seeking power through form. He gives them the mirror, then silence.
He writes notes in his journal:
- “Mandibular setback: 6mm off-center. Patient wept when attempting to speak.”
- “Patient 5 requested suicide drugs. Denied.”
- “If the face is weaponized entitlement, then disfigurement is deactivation.”
ACT III – FRACTURE
One victim escapes. Luc, 28, previously a minor YouTube face in the "looksmaxxing" community. He posts anonymously on Reddit and 4chan, with photos, surgical reports. At first, no one believes him—it's dismissed as cope, trolling.
But a young French medical student, Claire Roux, studying maxillofacial surgery, sees a photo and recognizes the surgical style. She has watched Adrian lecture. She idolized him.
Claire begins investigating. She reaches out to survivors. Some are unreachable. Some incoherent. One attempts suicide in a live stream.
She confronts Adrian directly at a professional conference. He simply tells her:
"They came to me because they believed in bone. I gave them what they needed—an end to belief."
FINAL ACT – UNMASKING
Claire leaks evidence. Adrian’s reputation collapses, but he vanishes from public life. His clinic is found abandoned. In the operating theater, a journal:
“The skull is the cathedral of self-deception. I took their altars and made them quiet.”
Final scene: a man walks into a different surgeon's clinic in Turkey, wearing a balaclava, asking to "correct a botched procedure." We hear the same phrases Vale once used—being spoken now by someone else. The cycle continues.
THEMES (STRIPPED OF SENTIMENTALISM):
- Clinical violence vs. emotional rot
- The face as battleground of identity, power, and delusion
- Deformity not as punishment—but as reflection of an already disfigured inner self
- Medicine as ideology
- The trap of aesthetic salvation