Overall Rating: 8.9/10
Dispossessed is one of those screenplays that sneaks up on you. What starts out looking like a straightforward possession story slowly reveals itself to be something much richer — a study of grief, race, faith, and motherhood, set against the backdrop of a struggling Bradford council estate. The horror is real, but it’s never the point. It’s the door Clare Perry uses to walk into much harder rooms.
The setting feels lived-in from the first page. There’s a rawness to the Bradford world that never tips into misery for its own sake — you believe these streets, these homes, these people. And at the center of it all is the connection between two families bound by a loss neither can make sense of. That relationship carries the whole script.
What’s most impressive is the restraint. Perry could have leaned on jump scares and shock value, and there are moments that would have supported it, but instead she keeps circling back to the human cost — guilt, prejudice, desperation, the ache of wanting something back that’s already gone. The dream sequences and the slow unraveling of Sophie are handled with a real visual instinct; you can see the film these pages want to become. The dialogue, too, sounds like it was actually written by someone who’s spent time in Yorkshire and understands the cultural textures of the community it’s portraying — nothing feels borrowed or generic.
Perhaps the biggest strength here is that nobody is flattened into a “type.” Even the characters who do genuinely harmful things are given enough interior life that you understand why, without ever being asked to forgive it. That’s a hard balance to strike, and it’s what gives the script its emotional staying power.
If there’s a note, it’s pacing. The middle stretch leans on a few emotional beats a little too often before the story finds its footing again — a tighter edit through that section would help the momentum without losing any of the depth that makes this script work.
Altogether, Dispossessed is a smart, emotionally honest piece of genre writing — the kind that stays with you well after you’ve put it down.