NARRATIVE - #vanlife
Narrative Feature
Title: #vanlife
Page Count: 86 pages
Project Status: In Development
Logline
When she’s aggressively pursued by an ambitious #vanlife influencer, an adrift hiker must reckon with whether she’s too guarded to be vulnerable or if this new relationship is threatening to take over her life.
Synopsis
Shelby (20s, white) and Dora (20s, Afro-Latina) both live out of their vehicles — Shelby in a Sprinter van easily worth over $100k, Dora in a beat-up Tacoma after losing her home in a wildfire. After an antagonistic first encounter, they strike up an unlikely friendship and protect each other from the various threats women face living alone in the wilderness.
Beneath her tough exterior, Dora is desperate for love — particularly from her estranged mother, Ana, whose life she stalks on Instagram. When Shelby discovers the full depth of Dora's loneliness after Ana brutally rejects her, she offers comfort, and their relationship turns romantic.
There's one problem: Shelby is a psychopath who absorbs her partners' identities wholesale, mining their personalities to fuel her influencer persona. When a fellow van-lifer warns Dora that Shelby likely killed her previous boyfriend (mauled to death in the opening scene), Dora can't dismiss it. Her suspicions are confirmed when she finds raw meat sewn into her daypack during a solo wilderness hike.
Dora escapes, fakes her own disappearance to lull Shelby into complacency, then tracks her down when she resurfaces on social media. Shelby is stuck in the evacuation traffic when Dora appears, chasing out of her van and straight into a raging wildfire.
In their final confrontation, Dora forces a full confession. Then she makes one of her own — revealing that beneath the rage, the question driving everything was simply: *why don't you love me?*
Additional Project Information
Director's Statement:
The American West in this film is unvarnished and volatile: parched grass, smoldering embers, bald tires, grimy windshields. The environment itself is a warning, feeding Dora's unease and forecasting the animal attacks, climate disasters, and betrayals ahead.
The film's visual language is split along the fault line of its two leads. Dora's world is tight frames, frenetic movement, and shallow focus, reflecting a life shaped by scarcity and loss. Shelby is captured in artfully composed wide shots that resemble Instagram posts more than reality. She is always in control, bending the world to her preferences.
Tonally, #vanlife is a slow-burn thriller where dread accumulates through atmosphere rather than spectacle. Sound design carries much of that weight: crunching footfalls, rattling engines, unseen animals howling in the dark. By the time the plot twists arrive, they feel both shocking and inevitable.
The script's two major set pieces, a grizzly bear attack and a wildfire chase into the final confrontation, will be executed through practical, in-camera effects. The bear sequence relies on sound design, high angles, and shadow; the audience's imagination fills in the gore. The final confrontation shifts to Shelby's phone livestream, keeping the frame tight on the actresses' faces as they sweat and choke through the smoke. This approach serves both the budget and the aesthetic: craft over CGI, performance over spectacle. The result keeps the film grounded in the same unvarnished register that defines its world from the first frame.
Team
Director: Virginia Root, Written by: Virginia Root and Isabelle Pierre
Financials
Current budget: $1.2 million
Seeking
Development Funds, Investors, Producing Partners
Rights Available
All rights available
Contact
Virginia Root