Scripts In production 1:

There’s a moment in every Punch and Judy show when the audience laughs and you’re not entirely sure why.

Punch hits Judy. The baby disappears. The policeman arrives too late. The crocodile snaps. The stick rises and falls. “That’s the way to do it.” It’s ritual. It’s tradition. It’s absurd. It’s funny.

Or is it?

This film lives in that space — not real-world logic, but nightmare logic. Puppet logic.

The story opens in a recognisable place: a modern shopping mall, where a Punch and Judy show plays to delighted children. The violence is theatrical, rhythmic, almost musical. Punch hits. Judy screams. The crowd responds on cue.

But when the puppets are packed away and the lid of the trunk closes, something shifts.

Inside the dark, Punch awakens — no longer a glove puppet, but conscious. Small. Afraid. The world around him has grown vast and distorted. The characters he once struck now tower over him. Judy is incandescent with rage. The Doctor bears the scars of their past encounter. Toby the Dog, once beaten for sport, bites back. The Crocodile waits, patient and hungry.

Punch insists it’s only a dream. He tries the only escape. To jump through the ceiling, a trick learned in childhood to escape the horrors of the subconscious mind.

But this world doesn’t obey waking rules. It obeys repetition. Ritual. Performance.

What unfolds is less a conventional narrative than a reckoning. Slapstick becomes testimony. Comic violence becomes consequence. The missing baby — tossed aside in play — returns as accusation. The abused become the abusers. The abuser becomes prey. Roles invert, then invert again, until victim and perpetrator are indistinguishable.

The film is about cycles — how violence sustains itself, how entertainment can disguise cruelty, how tradition can anaesthetise us to harm. Punch isn’t simply punished; he is absorbed into the very mechanism he helped perpetuate.

And when he finally smashes through the ceiling into blinding light, he doesn’t wake up.

A giant hand pulls him back into puppet form.

The show begins again.

“That’s the way to do it.”

PUNCH DRUNK is currently in production — a dark, surreal exploration of folklore, guilt and repetition, told through the warped grammar of a children’s puppet show that refuses to stay harmless.