The Guestbook

It's the not-too-different future. At a cabin in remote southwest Tasmania - an underworld of sorts - an ailing 60-year-old rifles through bedside drawers and discovers the titular guestbook. Pencil in hand, he's to spend several days over its pages.

Growing up on the mainland, The Protagonist as a boy comes to understand himself as intellectually 'slow'. But there's another aspect that Mum and Brother aren't sharing. Great pains are taken to conceal his physical development, and so The Protagonist figures he might be the only person who's growing. There's something dangerous about this, it seems. And yet it's not until the night of a bewildering high-school graduation that the real issue smacks him in the face. It causes him to skip town and commence a journey that shall pass windswept beaches, sleazy motels, football stadiums, soap stars, wild lions, a global conference, a heartbroken singer, a senile bodyguard, a pot-bellied trillionaire, and the one man 'upstairs' who may have the power to help.

Light-hearted and urgent, over-serious and not serious enough, The Guestbook is an episodic screenplay somewhat about love, meaning, and kinship. To a much greater extent, it is a tale of temporariness.