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Screenwriter Elias Reed discusses his new thriller, The Glass Room, and explains how character, isolation and emotional conflict shaped the screenplay.

Screenwriter Elias Reed has built his career around tense, character-driven stories. His latest film, The Glass Room, follows a journalist who becomes trapped inside a luxury apartment during a citywide blackout.

Although the film is presented as a thriller, Reed says the real story is about guilt and responsibility.

“Suspense only works when the audience cares about the person in danger,” he explains. “The locked room creates pressure, but the character’s past gives that pressure meaning.”

“I wanted the film to feel intimate rather than sentimental,” Voss explains. “Grief can be loud, but it can also appear in ordinary moments—making coffee, opening a cupboard or hearing a song you had forgotten.”

Voss began developing the screenplay five years ago, initially writing it as a short film. As the characters became more complex, she realised their story needed more room. The finished feature retains the focused atmosphere of a short while allowing the sisters’ relationship to unfold gradually.

Filmed over twenty-two days with a small cast and crew, After the Last Train reflects Voss’s preference for collaborative, character-led filmmaking. She encouraged the actors to question dialogue, explore pauses and bring personal observations into rehearsals.

As the story became more focused, he removed unnecessary scenes and kept most of the action inside a single apartment.

“Reducing the locations made the emotional conflict stronger,” he says. “There was nowhere for the main character to hide from the situation or from herself.”

Before becoming a full-time screenwriter, Reed worked as a script reader for independent production companies. The experience taught him how quickly an audience decides whether to continue with a story.

“You need to create curiosity early,” he says. “That does not always mean beginning with an explosion. It can be a strange detail, an unanswered question or a character behaving unexpectedly.”

His advice to aspiring screenwriters is to finish projects, seek useful feedback and avoid endlessly rewriting the opening pages.

“A completed imperfect script teaches you more than ten unfinished ideas,” he says. “You need to understand the whole journey before you can improve it.”

For Reed, screenwriting remains a process of discovery. The original idea may attract attention, but the deeper meaning often appears during rewriting.

“That is usually when the story begins telling you what it is really about.”