The Summer We Saw Margaret

(Miru)

---

Preliminary draft · with annotated visualized sequences

IP Frontier Studio · Madrid

Draft for evaluation · Confidential document

Selected scenes from the screenplay — full draft available under NDA.

© 2026 IP Frontier Studio. All rights reserved. · Contact: contact@ipfrontierstudio.com

Act 1

A working town at the mouth of a great river. Fishing boats asleep at their moorings. A water tower. The light comes up slowly, gray and cold, through the mist that still hasn't lifted off the river. The rooftops, green with moss, are still wet from the night.

A WHALE leaps across the screen: blue crayon, filling a sheet of notebook paper. A small hand adds its spout and then, two careful eyes.

MIRU REED, six years old, lying on his stomach on the living-room floor, tongue between his teeth, finishes the whale. Propped against the table leg, watching him, is MANGO: a four-dollar gray plush whale with one loose eye.

Miru holds up the drawing for Mango to judge. He nods its head up and down: Mango approves.

First morning of summer. Through the window, the river mist still hangs over the parking lot and the light comes in gray. Somewhere outside, a sprinkler ticks, patient as a clock.

On the wall above the bed, two worlds live side by side: a mess of whale drawings and, pinned among them, a worn pennant for the EXPLODING WHALES, the baseball team his dad promised him.

Miru turns to a clean sheet and looks toward the kitchen. His mother, SARA, is on the phone, keeping her voice low. From the floor, Miru can see her face: tired.

He starts a list. We read it over his shoulder, in cramped block letters:

THINGS MOM DOES NOW

He chews the pencil. Thinks. Writes:

— Talks to Dad on the phone.

Miru looks at Mango and whispers:

—Now she's going to hang up, and then she's going to look at me the way she does right before she tells me something I won't like.

He looks to his left. By the door sits the half-zipped weekend bag for his dad's place in Portland. A bat and a baseball glove poke out of the zipper.

Sara hangs up. Comes over. Sighs. Looks at the bag, then at her son.

—It's okay, Mom —Miru blurts—. I don't even like baseball that much. Whales are my thing.

He shows her the notebook with a smile that's missing two teeth. Sara gives him back a smile, all tenderness and pity. Then she hugs him.

—Dad's trying, but his boss doesn't make it easy. He promised that the second he can, he'll take you to see the Exploding Whales.

Miru lifts his head. That part does interest him. For a second he lights up —whales— and then goes dark again: he knows his dad's promises by now. And then, instead of getting sad, he makes the best of it. He shrugs, brave:

—I like summer here.

He means it. And as he says it, we see it:

— Miru, alone, in a sweatshirt, running through Mr. Percy's sprinklers in a gray parking lot. Behind him, huge and leaden, the biggest river in Oregon. Nobody swims in it.

— A street of houses with the blinds drawn and the cars loaded up, headed for the coast. Empty.

— The dinner table: an open can of salmon. Two plates.

— Miru on the porch, at dusk, talking to Mango.

Back to the living room. Miru hugs the stuffed whale.

—And Mango never goes anywhere. Like me. —He holds the gray-whale page out in front of her, very serious, like someone presenting evidence—. Whales go incredibly far and always, always come back to the same place.

He says it looking at Mango. But he's not talking about Mango. Sara hears it. Something breaks inside her and she doesn't let it show. Her eyes fall on the whale atlas resting beside Miru, the one she bought him at a thrift store: dog-eared, worn soft from use. The title promises a lot: The Fascinating, Secret World of Whales. And below it, the subtitle: The Favorite Animal of Intelligent People.

Sara sighs again. Sara's phone buzzes and pulls her back. On the screen: SAFEWAY, the supermarket where she works as a cashier. She already has her apron on.

She watches it ring. Once. Twice. She looks at the dog-eared atlas. She looks at her son hugging the stuffed whale. And she silences the call.

Then she turns to Miru, and now there's something else on her face, something he hasn't seen there in a long time:

—Get dressed. We're leaving.

She heads for the door, quick, before she can think twice.

—To your work? —Miru is lost—. Mr. Adley doesn't like me hanging around during your shift. —He grabs the stuffed whale, and then asks the only thing he really cares about—: Can I bring the atlas?

Act 2

The song that lasts an afternoon

Montage. A song that starts on the radio and swallows everything. Not a single word for four minutes: the music, the light, and the cuts tell it all.

Highway 101 opens up ahead of the red sedan, tiny against the asphalt. Inside, each still in their own world —Miru hugging his whale atlas, buzzing without knowing why; Sara with her hands on the wheel and a smile she doesn't quite let show—. Bronze light, dusty midday. The radio plays low. And then it swells.

A lightning-quick stop. Food in paper bags on their laps. Mango steals a fry from Miru, and Miru works the toy's head to make it chew; Sara catches it and the first real laugh of the day slips out of her. They look at each other. Warm air comes in through the window that won't close.

The song breaks into its chorus and Sara sings. Sings terribly, at the top of her lungs, and doesn't care. Miru cracks up, and then he lets loose too: rolls the window all the way down, holds Mango out into the wind, and the two of them dance in the front seat while the world rushes by, golden. The car doesn't seem small anymore. It's full.

Miru holds Mango out the window and makes him blow his toy spout into the wind — and the spout grows, turns into real water, a wave that bursts white against the rock.

The Pacific, all at once, enormous. Blue to the end of the world. The two of them go quiet, tiny against all that water, the backs of their necks pressed to the glass. Far off, a single boat alone on the sea. Nobody watches it. Half a second passes and it's gone.

The road hugs the cliff. In the distance, a fishing village appears, clinging to a cove, its harbor tiny, nameless. The car shows it and drives on past. They're almost there.

The sun starts to drop and everything softens. The song fades down. Inside, in silence, Sara reaches over and brushes the hair off Miru's face. He lets her. His eyelids are heavy.

Miru watches the sun sink into the water. His face doesn't darken: he watches it go with the calm of someone who knows, without the slightest doubt, that tomorrow it'll be back. He reaches for Mango, presses him to his chest, and gives him two calm little pats: what goes away comes back.

The sun sinks into the sea — and that same circle going dark is Miru's eyes closing. The day and the boy fall asleep at the same time.

Miru against the window, asleep, the last light crossing his face. Sara finds him in the rearview. She looks at him for a long while, and her face holds the whole question —whether what she's done today is right, whether she knows what she's doing—, and the peace of the sleeping kid answers her halfway. The music is almost nothing now.

Miru's breath fogs the glass. And the mist grows, spills over, turns into sea fog —thick, white— that swallows everything.

Miru has fallen asleep in one world. When he opens his eyes, he'll be in another.

Act 3

Miru opens his eyes. The first thing is the light. Where he fell asleep there was highway gray; now there's color. The car sits at the edge of Depoe Bay, a town that looks hand-painted: wooden houses crowded up the hillside over the water, each one a different color —rust red, robin's-egg blue, butter yellow, sea green—, the windows lit against the blue of nightfall. The fog tangles in the rooftops without quite swallowing them.

Miru rolls down the window without asking. In comes air that smells like everything at once: salt, wet wood, frying oil, sweet smoke. It smells like more. More than the aquarium, more than Astoria, more than anything.

Down on the dock, there's a party. Strings of lights running pole to pole, people, music carrying in pieces on the wind. And next to the moored ferry, a banner already a little eaten away by the salt: something about a boat called Cetus, 1996–2026. Sara and Miru are too full of what they're seeing to read it. It passes them by, unread. We catch it.

—Mom. —Miru doesn't peel his face off the glass—. Where are we?

Sara doesn't answer right away. She kills the engine. In the sudden quiet, the party below sounds farther off. She looks at the dashboard clock, looks at the gas needle grazing empty, looks —for a second— at the wallet in the door pocket. She runs a number she doesn't say out loud. Something crosses her face that isn't quite fear but is close to it: the first time all day reality has tapped her on the shoulder. They've come so far. Night is falling. This was, in theory, out and back.

Then she looks at Miru. And Miru isn't looking at her: he's looking at the town with his mouth open, hugging Mango to his chest, like a door's been opened to a place he didn't know existed. And that undoes the number. She closes the wallet.

—We're —she says— where you catch the boat.

—What boat?

Sara takes a breath. And finally says it out loud, to him and to herself:

—We're going to an island, sweetheart.

Miru is speechless. There's nothing bigger than this in his head. Bigger than the aquarium. Bigger than whales. Bigger than anything he could have thought to ask for. He squeezes Mango so hard the toy protests without a sound.

They head down to the dock through the party crowd. Sara buys two tickets at a little wooden booth. The ferry is small, worn planking, the bow light already on. The captain —an older man, an unlit pipe in the corner of his mouth— watches Miru come aboard with Mango and the whale atlas clutched to his chest. He looks at him a moment, like he recognizes him from somewhere.

—Today's the day, kid —he says. And doesn't explain what for.

They board. The engine coughs and catches. The ferry pulls away from the dock, and the party, the lights, the colored houses, all of it starts to shrink and soften behind them. The fog comes to meet them from the open sea, white and thick, and swallows the town in one bite, like it was never there.

Ahead, there's only white. Miru leans over the rail, toward the white, without an ounce of fear. Sara puts a hand on his shoulder — she doesn't know yet whether to steady him or to steady herself—.

They're heading toward another world. They don't yet know how much.

And Sara decides.

—MIRU! —She shouts it with everything she has. —Get down here! Stay with Walt! Don't leave his side!

Miru runs down and grabs the easel with both hands, planting it, holding it against the battering of the water.

Sara understands it all at once: the light doesn't go in. Someone has to take it in there, before Margaret leaves forever. She doesn't think about it any longer. She comes out of the water and starts to run.

Sara climbs. The spiral staircase, step by step, on the verge of slipping at every one, her hands dead with cold gripping the iron, her lungs burning. Up. Higher.

Walt, on his knees in the water, strikes the surface with his hand. Captain, the old dog who never gets wet, comes into the shallows and plants himself firmly next to Miru, barking at the mountain in front of them.

Sara bursts in. The lens turning, the motor, the beam fired at the horizon every twelve seconds. She grabs the frame with both frozen hands. She pushes. She forces it off its axis. She wrenches it downward, against the rotation, against the twelve seconds, and aims the beam at the water.

And for the first time, the light doesn't leave.

The beam goes into the sea.

And the black sea lights up from within. A beauty that has to hit the viewer like an act of violence: too much, all at once, impossible.

The whole bay, all at once, alive: kelp forests swaying like cathedrals of gold, gardens of open anemones, the rock reefs, the meadows of seagrass rippling, schools of silver fish that burst apart and re-form. Thirty years of a boat giving life back to the bottom, and there it all is, lit up out of nowhere, beneath them, real.

And in the middle of it all, no longer a shadow: Margaret, whole. Her true scale. The immense gray body, studded with barnacles, a living hillside suspended in the light. As she moves, the plankton lights up in her wake —a trail of cold, blue sparks— and goes out. Real energy. No magic. The sea, lit up.

Miru doesn't breathe. He's still holding the easel with both hands, but he's not here anymore: his mouth is open and he has the eyes of someone living, wide awake, the dream he's been talking about his whole life.

Without letting go of the wood, without taking his eyes off her, he crouches and sets Mango down on the wet sand. The pretend one isn't needed anymore.

Margaret comes into the shallows. On her own, on her terms, the way she's done for thirty years with this shore and only this shore. Her enormous head glides until it's an arm's length from the boy.

Miru lifts his hand and lays it on her. The skin wet, cold, hard, real. The plankton lights up around his fingers.

And Margaret opens her eye. She wouldn't have to, but she opens it, a second after feeling his touch. The dark eye, ancient, the size of a fist, and beside it —clean, white, unmistakable— the mark. The one Eleanor saw. The one that made her different from all the rest.

Walt sees her. He finally sees her. The mark, lit up, ten feet away, still.

And for a second she stops being a whale. Walt isn't looking at an animal: he's looking at what she saw, what he never knew how to see, what had been in front of him for twelve years without his reaching it. Something loosens in his face that the whole film has held shut. He says nothing. He doesn't need to say anything. He's a man who's just reached a place he thought he'd never reach again.

Miru holds his hand —the same one that just touched Margaret, still warm from her— and brings it to the brush, and the brush to the only gap left on the canvas: the inside of the eye Eleanor left empty. Walt feels the boy's fingers trembling, from cold, from something else. The sea hits his legs. Margaret holds there, lingering, the way the ones who trust do.

And Walt makes the brushstroke, helped by Miru. The one he hasn't made in twelve years. Over the eye. Over the mark. It doesn't matter if it's precise or not, it's hard to tell, in a single stroke. He feels Miru squeeze his hand so he won't miss. He feels his warmth.

The brush lifts from the canvas. Walt stands looking at her. And then, so low the foam almost carries it off, not to Sara, not to Miru, to the black water where she always was:

—It's done. —A pause. —…Eleanor.

The old melody from before comes back, now without words, slowly, underneath everything.

Up in the lantern, Sara holds the light with both hands and looks down at what she's made appear. The whole sea lit up, the whale, the boy with his hand on her, the old man painting. Sara's face says nothing. It doesn't need to. It's the face of someone who, for once in her life, decided something and had it turn out right.

She races down, praying Margaret won't leave yet. She runs across the sand. And before she gets there she hears Walt and Miru laughing: not laughing, full belly laughs, the kind that only come out when you've held a lot in. Sara drops to her knees in the sand just as Margaret decides to leave the cold shore of Heron Point forever.

Walt and Miru watch her leave, silent, with an elegance that shouldn't fit in almost forty tons of animal.

—See, Mom. I told you they don't fit in an aquarium.

Sara hugs her son, soaked, frozen, happy. She looks into his eyes.

—That's why we had to come to Heron Point.

Up above, the lighthouse beam releases on its own and goes back to its turning. It sweeps the empty water. Twelve seconds, and it leaves. No trace of the seabed and its secret life. No trace of Margaret. No trace of the waves.

But there is a trace of an easel facing the Pacific, with the finished portrait of a whale. A painting that's finally a painting.

Walt still has one thing left. He dips the brush and signs, down in the corner, what he hadn't signed in far too long:

Margaret. Oil on canvas. 2026.
Eleanor Greer

End of Act 3

Act 4

Light. Just light, filling everything.

In close-up, a huge, wet nose sniffs at something very up close. Captain. The shot widens: what he's sniffing is Miru's face, curled in a ball on the couch, Mango under his arm. The dog licks him from chin to forehead until the boy wrinkles his nose, opens one eye, and laughs.

The room is a different one. The terrace window, thrown wide open; the sea breeze comes in, warm. It's the first real day of summer: heat, seagulls, the smell of toast and coffee.

Sara, by the fire, pours coffee with a smile too big for her face.

Miru turns his head, looking. No sign of Walt. He doesn't see him —Captain's on top of him— but he's right behind them, hands on his hips, watching him. When Miru notices, he looks at him a moment. The old man seems ten years younger. From last night, or from them.

Here's the thing about Walt: alone, or with someone he doesn't know, he's gone so long without talking that he's lost the habit. But with people he trusts in front of him, he has a whole world to tell.

—In '68 they made me a sailor by accident. —He butters a piece of toast without looking at anyone, like it's no big deal, but the whole table is already hanging on it. —I was eighteen, with one single virtue, sleeping anywhere, and some friends with bad intentions. One night, as a joke, they left me passed out in the hold of a freighter moored in the port. The point was for me to wake up not knowing where I was and get the fright of my life. —He drinks coffee. —It worked out so-so. The ship sailed before dawn. When I opened my eyes, twelve hours later, there was no port, no friends, no joke: just freezing sea to the edge of the world and a cook who looked at me and asked whether I peeled potatoes or swam back. —A dry pause. —I peeled potatoes. Thirty years. —He shrugs. —Some people find their life by studying. I found mine through a hazing. And from that day on I've never slept more than four hours straight: just enough that, if it happens to me again, I'll have time to get off and catch the bus back home.

He looks at the smooth sea through the window.

—Though last night… last night's worth a good long nap. —He looks up at Miru. —What's wrong? Doesn't breakfast call your name?

Miru gets up, gives his mother a kiss, and lunges for an ear of corn like he hasn't eaten in a week. They eat. But they barely talk, no need. Miru looks at his mother and sees a youthfulness he didn't know in her: her cheeks flushed, no circles under her eyes, her eyes turned the color of green glass in the light. Captain, at their feet, begs them with his eyes for a piece of bread for the rug. But nobody notices him.

And then Miru notices it, for the first time. The easel, in the middle of the living room, with last night's painting. Miru didn't remember it like this. The canvas is torn at one corner. It has water —real water—, bits of sea, a piece of seaweed stuck to it —real seaweed—, a little sand —real sand—. Margaret is perfect. But the mark on the eye, the one Walt and he made together, runs up her face to the middle of her forehead.

Miru leaves the corn half-eaten. He looks at Walt. He looks at his mother. The two of them are already looking at the painting. They start to laugh. A little at first. Then more. Then a lot. Then they can't stop.

When they get their breath back, Walt:

—I told you Eleanor wouldn't even let me pick up the brushes to paint the lighthouse. —He nods his chin at the painting. —She shouldn't let you either. Not ever again.

And they laugh again.

The music swells, cinematic now. Workers hang, one by one, Eleanor's paintings in a newly opened wing.

Sara and Miru, in a side room, dress up for something important. Miru steps up on tiptoe to fix Walt's bow tie. Walt won't let him, but Miru gets insistent, looking at him very seriously, and the old man finally lets himself be helped.

Walt goes up before an auditorium with a stiff face. In the middle of the stage, facing the audience, the Margaret painting: uncleaned, with its water and its seaweed and its sand, witness to the battle. He speaks. He starts off serious, but after two or three sentences someone in the audience starts to laugh. Here his dance begins: he starts gesturing, moving around the stage, miming that he's limping, frozen with cold, and spreading his hands to show how big a whale is. The audience roars with laughter —Walt makes sharp, dry, funny flourishes, and Captain, beside him, barks, and even howls— and, without realizing it, his voice cracks in the middle of a sentence. People applaud, rise to their feet.

In the front row, Miru and his mother look at each other. Miru rests his head on her shoulder.

To the right, one more seat: James. Miru, without turning his head, without taking his eyes off Walt, reaches out and puts his hand over his father's. The circle closes.

And the music carries off the images of a whole summer, dissolving into each other:

At the lighthouse: Miru pulls things out of the water and hands them to Walt, who discards them, tossing them off to one side of the sand —one, two, three— for his collection of what the sea spits up. Until Miru finds some piece of useless nonsense and shows it to him. Walt examines it closely and with interest, opens his mouth like it's a treasure. But the second Miru turns around, happy, to look for more, Walt hurls it way off and plays innocent. Captain takes off running, brings it dutifully back in front of the old man's blank face, and hands it to Miru, who hugs it.

Sara, alone on the terrace, watching the sun go down. She breathes. She turns around and Miru brings her a piece cut from the Safeway apron. Sara sets it on the table, on top of the pile of napkins they've already made out of it.

And the last image of the summer, frozen the way a memory freezes: the three of them on the dock, posing for a photo in front of the research vessel, the name CETUS big across the hull. The scientists around them, smiling. The flash. The photo holds still a moment —kept forever— and dissolves to the last scene.

The song thins out.

Miru, sitting in the sand, Eleanor's notebook open in his lap. He's drawing. A whale. And, tongue between his teeth, just like the first day, he adds its spout and then, two careful eyes. Only this time he's not copying them from an atlas.

He looks up. Far, far away, out to sea, a spout. A column of mist that rises and dissolves. A gray, surfacing, coming back, the way they come back.

Miru doesn't shout. There's no need anymore. Now he knows. He just lowers his eyes to the notebook again and keeps drawing.

Final shot: the page. On one side, Eleanor's old drawings, her handwriting, her birds, her whale with the mark beside the eye. On the other, Miru's, fresh, the paint still wet.

The notebook she never finished, finished.

The song resolves.