TREATMENT

FORMAT & TONE

Feature film. Exploitation revenge drama. 121 pages.

I THINK HE'S A COWBOY operates in the space between Terrence Malick and Larry Clark — lyrical, sun-drenched intimacy pressed against sudden, stomach-turning violence, all set in a summer landscape that feels like paradise until it doesn't. The first two acts are a coming-of-age story built on quiet moments: a boy and an old man listening to Neutral Milk Hotel on a dusty turntable, sharing gum on the beach, sitting in comfortable silence while one draws and the other files down a piece of metal. The humor is lived-in and warm — a man dancing alone in a pink robe, a teenager describing coffee as tasting like "rust and trauma." The film earns its audience's love before it takes it away. When the violence arrives, it is not cathartic. It is the end of something real. The third act shifts into a revenge thriller that operates under the logic of exploitation cinema — a wounded man driving through the American South with a duffel bag full of weapons — but the emotional engine is grief, not spectacle. The violence is ugly, exhausting, and committed by broken people. Nobody looks cool. Nobody wins.

The film uses a fractured timeline. Flashbacks are shot in 4:3 aspect ratio, distinguishing Swithin's past life as a contract killer from the widescreen present. These sequences — a hit on a night train through Eastern Europe, a tense resignation in a crime boss's back office, the clinical steps of faking one's own death — are parceled out across the narrative, each one recontextualizing what Swithin's retirement actually cost and what it was supposed to buy him. The effect is a portrait assembled in reverse: we meet the man first, then learn the monster he used to be, and then watch him become something in between.

SETTING

Folly Beach, South Carolina, and the surrounding Lowcountry — then Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, then Atlanta, Georgia, then the swamp country of Belle Glade, Florida. The story begins and lives longest on Folly Beach, a narrow barrier island where the houses are weathered and elevated on stilts, the roads are sandy, and the ocean is always audible. The beach is not glamorous. It's faded rental houses, cluttered garages, golf carts on cracked pavement, tiki torches, and Tom Petty on a Bluetooth speaker. The landscape is beautiful in the way that impermanent things are beautiful — salt-bleached, wind-worn, temporary.

Pittsburgh arrives for the funeral: gray sky, cold rain, a cemetery that seems to exist in permanent overcast. Atlanta is neon and bass — a nightclub called El Jardín where the crime boss holds court in a wood-paneled office that hasn't changed in decades. Belle Glade is the end of the road: rural Florida, flat and swampy, a house set back from a dirt road where terrible things happen behind drawn curtains. The geography mirrors the emotional trajectory — from openness and light to enclosed, suffocating darkness.

CHARACTERS

SWITHIN HOWARD WINSLOW (56): A retired contract killer disguised as a quiet neighbor. Swithin dresses like a man who peaked in 1993 and never updated the wardrobe — cowboy hat, snakeskin boots, open-collared shirts stained with sweat and yesterday's bourbon. He lives alone in a rented beach house, dances by himself in a pink woman's robe, sends dick pics to strangers on dating apps, and cleans his guns the way other men do crossword puzzles. He is an alcoholic. He is lonely in a way he cannot name. He faked his own death to escape Pedro Limes's criminal operation and has spent the years since doing nothing — sitting on porches, smoking, staring at the ocean with the posture of a man waiting for something he doesn't believe will come. Swithin's arc is not redemption. It is the discovery, late in life, that he is capable of love — and the immediate, total destruction of the thing he loves. His revenge is not righteous. It is the only language he speaks fluently, deployed on behalf of the one person who made him want to learn a new one.

ESMÉ INGRAM ACOTT (15): A quiet, artistic boy carrying grief he doesn't know how to put down. Esmé lost his father and hasn't recovered. He writes poetry, keeps a Moleskine sketchbook filled with precise ink drawings — bonfires made of watching eyes, hands, birds with swords — and moves through the world like someone trying to take up as little space as possible. He wears hoodies in the heat. He flinches when people raise their voices. He is not weak; he is unfinished, and he knows it, and that knowledge is its own kind of pain. Esmé is the emotional center of the film. Every relationship orbits him — Swithin's awakening, Thomas's cruelty, Adele's worry, Henrietta's curiosity. His death is the hinge on which the story turns, not because he is a symbol but because he is a person, and the film has spent an hour making the audience know him.

ADELE ALANNA KRUEGER (44): Esmé's mother. A woman stretched thin between protecting her son and building a new life with a man who doesn't understand him. Adele is warm, intelligent, and tired in the way single mothers who've remarried too soon are tired — managing everyone's feelings while her own pile up unattended. She sees Swithin as a threat she can't quite articulate, and Thomas as a partner whose flaws she's chosen to tolerate. After Esmé's death, her grief is volcanic and specific. She blames Swithin, not because she believes it logically, but because blame is the only thing that keeps the ground from falling away.

THOMAS HERMAN CALDWELL (47): Adele's boyfriend. Thomas is not a villain. He is something more common and more insidious — a man who mistakes cruelty for humor, control for love, and toughness for parenting. He mocks Esmé constantly, always with plausible deniability: "I'm just teasing." "Builds character." He compares the boy to a sea sponge in front of strangers. He calls his brooding an "artist routine." Thomas believes he is the reasonable adult in every room, and this belief makes him the most dangerous person in Esmé's daily life. At Esmé's funeral reception, an older woman tells Thomas that the world needs more boys who feel things, and the plate in his hand bends under his grip. He walks out without speaking.

YESSIREE BOB (40): A contract killer and serial predator. Bob arrives on Folly Beach wearing a police uniform that doesn't quite fit the role — the shoes are wrong, there's no radio, no partner, no cruiser number. He checks into a motel with Webster, a sixteen-year-old boy he controls through isolation, manipulation, and implied violence. Bob is patient, methodical, and curious in the way a predator is curious — he walks the beach barefoot, collects shells, writes in a small black notebook with careful handwriting. He cleans his weapons with the same deliberate attention. Pedro sent him to kill Swithin, but Bob is something far worse than a hired gun: he abducts and tortures young victims, operating under Pedro's protection as part of a trafficking network. His house in Belle Glade contains a plywood board with handcuffs bolted to each corner and a plastic tarp taped to the floor beneath it. He is the story's embodiment of human evil — not chaotic, not passionate, but organized and banal, the kind of monster who tells a terrified child, "It's easier if you don't fight."

PEDRO VALERIO LIMES (mid 70s): A crime boss who looks like someone's kindly grandfather. Pedro runs his operation from the back office of an Atlanta nightclub — wood paneling, Persian rug, ceramic dish of hard candies, books in Hungarian, French, and Russian. He wears a soft gray cardigan and tortoiseshell glasses. His eyes are black ice. Pedro let Swithin walk away years ago with a warning: "If I see a ripple, I will carve you out like rot." He is cultured, articulate, and utterly without conscience. He arranges Bob's trafficking operations with the same businesslike detachment he uses to order tea. When Swithin confronts him, Pedro doesn't beg. He delivers the truth: that a man with Swithin's body count has no right to grieve. He is almost relieved when Swithin pulls the trigger.

PAUL BENOÎT DELACROIX (70s): Swithin's oldest friend. Paul runs a cluttered garage on Folly Beach — a museum of mechanical life, rusted fan belts, mismatched tools, and a motorcycle frame suspended from the rafters. He taught Swithin everything about engines and, by extension, about patience. Paul is gruff, economical with words, and perceptive in the way that people who work with their hands tend to be. He becomes Esmé's second mentor, the man who tells him, "Tight things break sooner. Best to leave a little give. The same goes for people."

WEBSTER BRANDON MACAY (16): Bob's captive. Webster is a teenager who has been groomed into compliance — he lies still on motel beds with his sneakers on, doesn't eat unless told, and flinches at the wrong kind of silence. He is not a willing participant. He is a hostage who has forgotten what freedom feels like. In the film's climax, Bob forces Webster to stab another teenager to prove loyalty. Webster does it. Then he collapses. Swithin finds him afterward, blood on his hands, rocking against a wall, whispering, "He said I was just like him." Swithin tells him Bob was wrong.

HENRIETTA MARIA FOWLER (16): A local girl who sees Esmé clearly. Henrietta is confident, sharp-eyed, and interested in Esmé in a way that nobody else is — not as a project, not as a problem, but as a person worth knowing. She calls him weird and means it as a compliment. She nudges his knee at a bonfire. She represents the life Esmé might have grown into.

STORY

The film opens in a forest. A barefoot woman in her twenties tears through the woods, wild-eyed and terrified. She reaches a river, slips, and tumbles into the water. Behind her, Swithin — younger, clean-shaven, dressed like a rock 'n' roll cowboy on the far side of his glory days — walks with a silenced Beretta. His voiceover is calm, almost philosophical: he is a creature of habit, a man who finds comfort in patterns, who believes predictability is control and control is survival. He catches the woman and shoots her twice in the face. Title card: I THINK HE'S A COWBOY.

Cut to the present. A family SUV hums along a coastal South Carolina highway. In the backseat, fifteen-year-old Esmé Ingram Acott leans against the window, earbuds in, eyes on the blur of dunes and sea grass. Beside him, his stepsiblings bicker — Lovell, eleven, narrates his Minecraft conquests; Simona, seventeen, threatens to throw his iPad out the window. Up front, Thomas grips the wheel. Adele, Esmé's mother, glances back and asks if he's okay. He doesn't respond.

At a roadside diner, the family dynamic crystallizes. Thomas needles Esmé about his appetite, his brooding, his "artist routine." Esmé barely speaks. When Thomas pushes too hard, Esmé stands and leaves the table without a word. The adults exchange looks. Thomas calls it dramatic. Adele's expression says something else entirely.

They arrive at Folly Beach. The rental house is weathered and wrapped in wild sea grass. Esmé carries his bags alone. Thomas watches and offers help with forced cheerfulness. Esmé says one word: "No." Inside the house, Thomas keeps at it — questioning Esmé's work ethic, calling him an inconvenience. Adele intervenes, but softly, always softly. In their bedroom, she tells Thomas that the boy lost his father and is surrounded by strangers who make fun of him. Thomas doesn't hear it. "He's gotta grow up sometime."

Esmé escapes to the back porch. The ocean stretches ahead. From the porch next door, a man in a cowboy hat lights a cigarette. Swithin turns and catches Esmé's gaze — a long, unreadable look. No smile. No nod. Then he looks away. Esmé stays. He doesn't know why.

That evening, we see Swithin alone. An upbeat hip-hop track blares from a dusty speaker. Swithin sways and stumbles in rhythm, wearing a sheer pink woman's robe, cowboy hat still on, a glass of scotch sloshing in his hand. He dances alone in the dark.

The neighbors — Carlo and Rowena Isaiah, a warm, chaotic couple with seven-year-old twins — throw a gathering. The families mingle. Thomas drinks, performs, and commands the room. Esmé hovers at the snack table, where Henrietta Fowler approaches. She's sixteen, wears a washed-out band tee, and sips white wine like she was born in an art gallery. She calls him mysterious. He says he mostly rides his golf cart and hangs out with his neighbor. "The dude who dresses like a cowboy?" She asks what Swithin teaches him. Esmé shrugs: "Just stuff." She studies him and decides, "You're weird. I like it." Esmé blushes visibly. Across the room, Thomas clocks the interaction and steers the conversation toward Swithin: "The guy creeps me out. Just something off."

At dinner the next evening, Thomas escalates. He mocks Esmé's notebook, his eating habits, and his general temperament. He suggests buying him a skull-covered diary to write sad poems about hating shrimp. Esmé stands, says, "I'm done," and disappears. On the beach at dusk, he sits alone. Swithin approaches. Doesn't ask what happened. Doesn't push. He sits beside the boy, offers a piece of gum, and says, "Chewing helps your jaw relax. Keeps the anger outta your teeth." They sit in silence. It is the first kind gesture anyone has made all summer.

Through a series of flashbacks in 4:3 aspect ratio, Swithin's past assembles itself. He was a contract killer for Pedro Valerio Limes, a cultured, grandfatherly crime boss who ran his operation from the back office of an Atlanta nightclub called El Jardín. In the office — wood paneling, Persian rug, hard candies on the desk — Swithin tells Pedro he's out. Pedro studies him with the mild interest of a man watching a light bulb burn out. "The ghost wants to stop haunting houses." He lets Swithin go, but the warning is clear: "If I see a ripple — if I hear even your breath in a room that doesn't belong to you — I will carve you out like rot." Swithin fakes his own death using another person's body. We see the process in clinical, step-by-step detail — choosing a corpse, matching dental records, staging the scene. He vanishes.

On Folly Beach, the friendship deepens. Swithin picks up Esmé in his truck during a rainstorm when the golf cart dies. He takes him to Paul's garage — a cluttered cathedral of mechanical life where Paul Delacroix, Swithin's oldest friend, teaches Esmé to use a wrench, listen to an engine, and leave a little give in things that are too tight. "The same goes for people." Esmé begins spending his days at the garage. He and Swithin listen to records on a dusty Technics turntable — Neutral Milk Hotel, R.E.M., Sebadoh, bands Esmé has never heard of. Swithin tells him about '90s indie 7-inches— pressed cheap, sold at shows for gas money. "The B-sides were where the real stuff lived. The thing nobody expected anyone to hear." Esmé sketches Swithin's hands. Gnarled, scarred, careful. Swithin asks why he draws parts of people instead of whole people. "People are too much. Hands are simpler." Swithin tells him: "No, they're not."

On the beach one evening, Swithin shares something private. He talks about R.E.M.'s "Country Feedback" — not one of the hits, a deep cut. "It sounds like someone admitting something too late, "Esmé asks if the song helped, after jobs, in hotel rooms. "No. But it was honest. Sometimes that's enough." Esmé asks what Swithin would have had if things were different. Swithin doesn't answer. He starts walking.

Meanwhile, a parallel threat arrives. Yessiree Bob checks into a beach motel in a crisp police uniform — badge gleaming, white socks too clean for the clothes. With him is Webster Macay, a sixteen-year-old boy who lies curled on the motel bed with his sneakers on, staring at nothing. Bob watches a 1941 Superman cartoon with childlike attention, barefoot, pant legs rolled up. Then his eyes flick to a duffel bag in the corner. Something matte black peeks through the half-open zipper.

Bob patrols Folly Beach. He visits Paul's garage, posing as county police, asking routine questions. Swithin notices what's wrong: cheap dress shoes, no radio, no partner, no cruiser number on the car. Bob asks about Esmé. Swithin's jaw tightens. After Bob leaves, Swithin calls Paul. "His shoes were wrong." He crumples the slip of paper Bob left — just a phone number, no department header — and throws it in the trash. Then he reaches back in and puts it in his pocket.

At the beach motel, Bob's control over Webster is drawn in small, devastating strokes. He shaves at the mirror and interrogates the boy about his day without looking at him. He squeezes the back of Webster's neck — "the gesture of a coach, a father" — and holds it a beat too long. He tells Webster that people out there wouldn't understand what they have. Webster nods. His eyes drop to the carpet. At night, Bob writes in a small black notebook with careful handwriting while Webster lies on the other bed, gripping the mattress until his knuckles go white.

The Fourth of July. Esmé invites Swithin to the beach cookout. Swithin declines. "I don't do parades." Esmé shrugs: "You're not as weird as they think." "I'm worse." At the cookout — bonfire, fireworks, Tom Petty on a speaker — Esmé sits near the fire with Henrietta. They talk about crabs, about jetties. She nudges his knee. Then Simona cuts in: "Don't encourage him. He's like a rescue possum — cute until he bites." Lovell joins: "Tell Henrietta about your diary." Thomas delivers the kill shot, comparing Esmé to a sea sponge — "you poke him, and he soaks it all in, sulks about it for a week, then writes poetry to the moon." The crowd laughs. Even Carlo cracks a smile. Esmé runs.

He arrives at Swithin's dark porch, curls up on the swing, shaking with rage. The back door opens. Swithin sees him. He doesn't say anything. He just steps back and leaves the door open behind him. An invitation. Inside, Swithin pours himself a drink and offers the boy a spare room. But first, he listens. Esmé tells him what happened — the mocking, the laughter, the way even his attempt to push back became proof that he was the problem. Swithin doesn't minimize it. He tells Esmé that hitting his limit isn't weakness, it's survival. "He wants to see you cracked. Because he knows he can't break you outright." Before bed, Swithin tells him, "You did well."

The next morning, Esmé finds Swithin at the kitchen counter with a disassembled pistol. A folding knife. A zippered case of ammo. Cleaning supplies. Swithin wipes down a barrel like it's no different from washing a spoon. "Spring cleaning." He pours Esmé a terrible cup of coffee. They sit in a new kind of silence — the kind between people who trust each other.

Adele, panicking at the beach house, discovers Esmé never came home. She finds him at Swithin's. The confrontation between Adele and Swithin is civil but charged — two adults who care about the same boy and can't quite agree on how to do so. Swithin is respectful but immovable.

In their last scene together at Paul's garage, Esmé flips through a crate of 7-inch vinyl while a record crackles on the turntable. They talk about B-sides and buried treasure. Swithin tells Esmé he's not weird — he's unfinished. "Everyone's weird before they're done cooking, "Esmé asks how you know when you're done. "You never are. But you start choosing the ingredients yourself." He tells the boy not to rush past being fifteen. "It's where the gold is — even if it feels like mud." Esmé thanks him for everything. Swithin gives him a Neutral Milk Hotel 7-inch to add to his collection. At the garage bay doors, silhouetted in sunlight, Esmé asks if Swithin will be around tomorrow. "If you knock, I'll answer." Esmé heads out. Across the road, Bob watches from his sedan.

Esmé returns to the garage to retrieve a forgotten sketchbook. He opens the side door and walks into the middle of a standoff — Bob has arrived with a silenced gun and is confronting Swithin. Esmé says, "Hey — I forgot my sketchbook." He steps inside before seeing Bob. Bob shoots. The bullet hits Esmé in the face. He crumples to the floor. Swithin screams. Bob studies the body with no surprise, no regret — "the way a man surveys a broken appliance" — then raises the gun and shoots Swithin twice. Bob walks out. Drives away, slow and steady.

Swithin survives. He wakes in a hospital bed — pale, stitched, wired to machines. Behind his eyes: not fear, not pain. Just purpose. He tells the police nothing.

In Pittsburgh, under a heavy gray sky, Swithin arrives at Esmé's funeral. Adele intercepts him before the service. The confrontation is devastating: "You were supposed to look out for him." "You brought him into your world. That's why he's gone." Swithin absorbs it. He tells her he came because Esmé mattered to him. "If he mattered, he'd still be alive." She walks away. Swithin stands in the rain and watches the funeral from a distance. He doesn't attend the burial.

In a motel room, intercut with the priest's eulogy, Swithin lays out an arsenal: handguns, a sawed-off shotgun, an AR-15, knives, grenades, C4, flashbangs, night vision, bolt cutters, disguises, burner phones, and cash. He fills a duffel bag with the deliberation of a man performing a sacrament. The priest's words land over the images: "Let his absence be a weight that shifts the earth beneath the guilty."

At the funeral reception, Thomas stands with an untouched plate. An older woman approaches — Esmé's middle-school art teacher. She tells Thomas that Esmé was the most sensitive boy she ever taught. "The world needs more boys like that. The ones who feel things." The plate bends in Thomas's grip. He sets it down and walks out.

Swithin drives to Atlanta. He arrives at Pedro's nightclub, barely able to stand — gray-skinned, bleeding through his shirt, his wound reopened. He fights his way past two guards at the back door with a kitchen knife and a stolen gun, every impact whiting out his vision with pain. In the back office, Pedro sits behind his desk. Nothing has changed — the rug, the books, the hard candies. "I wondered how long before you came." Pedro doesn't apologize. He tells Swithin the truth: that Bob was sent for Swithin, that Esmé was incidental, that a man with Swithin's body count doesn't get to be righteous. "You're a killer mourning a kill. That's all this is." Swithin asks where Bob is. Pedro gives up the address — Belle Glade, Florida — and delivers a final judgment: "You think killing Bob brings the boy back? You think it fills whatever hole you've been digging since Prague?" Then he pops a hard candy into his mouth. Swithin raises the gun. Pedro almost looks relieved. He whispers: "Still rusted." Swithin fires. Pedro slumps. The hard candy rolls off the desk and clicks across the floor.

On Pedro's phone, Swithin finds a text thread confirming everything: Bob trafficking children — "Package ready. Same as last time. Young." — Pedro arranging payment, delivery, and photographs. An address in Belle Glade.

Swithin drives south. The road burns through gas stations and fast food restaurants where he eats alone, surrounded by families and children. In a Long John Silver's booth, he chews slowly and watches life go on. Flashbacks tear through — quick, unflinching shots of men and women being executed, Swithin's old work, the stain he can't scrub away.

In Belle Glade, Bob's house sits on a rural road, its windows drawn. Inside, Bob has hogtied three teenagers — Webster, Tad, and Rita — and is testing them. He forces Webster to prove his loyalty by stabbing Rita. Webster, terrified and broken, plunges the knife into her back. He immediately recoils: "Oh God — what did I do?" Bob presses a bloodied hand against his chest, almost tender: "You did what you had to." He tells Webster that his prints are on the knife, his soul is in the dirt. "You and me — we're the same. Welcome to the family."

From the kitchen: the sound of a shotgun being pumped.

Swithin steps out of the shadows. Shotgun leveled. Face a ruin. Bob smiles flatly: "The cowboy. Pedro said you were dead." "Pedro's not saying much these days." Bob tries to equalize — tells Swithin they're the same, two killers, one honest about what he enjoys. "The only difference between us is I'm honest about what I enjoy." Swithin glances at Webster, at Rita bleeding on the floor, at Tad shaking in the doorway. He looks at Bob. "I know what you are." Bob's hand tightens on his revolver. He says of Esmé: "They're all fifteen. That's the whole point."

Swithin fires. The blast fills the room.

He frees the teenagers. He cuts their ropes. He presses a cloth against Rita's wound and tells her to hold it. He kneels in front of Webster — blood on the boy's hands, vacancy behind his eyes — and tells him to stand. Webster whispers, "He said I was just like him." Swithin says: "He was wrong." He tells Tad to call 911. Then he walks out the back door.

He reaches his truck on a dirt road beyond the tree line. From the glovebox, he pulls a folded piece of paper — Esmé's sketch of his hands, torn carefully from the sketchbook. The lines are precise and honest: the gnarled fingers, the scars, the quiet strength. He props it against the windshield.

Behind him, through the trees, ambulance lights strobe red and blue.

Swithin starts the engine. The truck pulls onto the road. Behind it, the flashing lights paint the house in alternating colors.

On the highway at dawn, the sky lightens to a pale gray line. Swithin drives with one hand on the wheel, battered and blood-soaked. Esmé's sketch catches the first light.

The road stretches ahead — endless, open, and indifferent.

Swithin drives into it.