Genre: Techno-Religious
Thriller Pitch Type: High-Concept / Social Commentary.
The Logline
A paranoid data analyst and a whistleblower priest must dismantle an unholy alliance between a global pharmaceutical empire and the Vatican—a conspiracy that has hijacked human biology to trap the world in a profitable cycle of exhaustion and sedation.
The Elevator Pitch
In the near future, the world is powered by two companies: RISE, which sells hyper-productivity in a can, and HALO, the only pill that can shut your brain down at night.
They aren’t rivals—they are a closed-loop system. Sam, a paranoid data-miner who hides behind his screens, discovers that this ‘biological cage’ is secretly funded by the Vatican.
The Church isn’t just seeking profit; they are using the chemical vulnerability of a broken population to fill their pews and reclaim control over the human soul.
Joined by an insurgent priest and a rebellious AI, Sam sets out to wake the world up. But as they fight to destroy the system, they realize the most dangerous prison isn’t the pill—it’s our own tribal instinct to turn ‘Us’ against ‘Them’. It’s a story about the cost of freedom, the corruption of faith, and the tragic human habit of building new cages just as we escape the old ones.
Copyright Paul Bakker The Netherlands 2026
The film becomes powerful if you don’t portray it as: “The Church and Big Pharma are bad.”
But as: People are so afraid of freedom that they build systems that first numb them and then sell them meaning. That is much more interesting.
The best reason to make a film out of it: the central image is rock-solid.
During the day: become more than human. At night: switch yourself off.
In between: a human who thinks he is alive, but is merely being managed.
That is almost ridiculously cinematic. It is a closed ritual. A modern mass: stimulus, guilt, exhaustion, redemption, repetition.
Yes, but it has more, so I made The Sovereign Glitch