Thelma (2024) — Read, Study & Download the Screenplay
A senior-action caper about scams, stubbornness, and refusing to be treated like furniture.
Thelma follows 93-year-old Thelma Post after she is tricked by a phone scammer pretending to be her grandson. Josh Margolin’s screenplay turns a painfully believable fraud into a warm, funny, low-speed action quest, as Thelma decides that getting older does not mean surrendering her money, her judgment, or her right to make a spectacularly questionable plan.
For writers and film students, this is a sharp study in scale and genre translation. The script borrows the rhythms of a mission movie, then rebuilds them around hearing aids, mobility scooters, family anxiety, old friendships, and the tiny physical obstacles that become enormous when the hero is ninety-three and absolutely not interested in being managed.
Thelma Study Notes
What writers and film students can learn from this screenplay
By: Nick Runyeard
Thelma is useful to study because it turns a small, ordinary crisis into a character-driven adventure. The screenplay begins with everyday vulnerability: emails, hearing aids, family check-ins, old routines, and the quiet logistics of aging. Then it reframes those details as action-movie tools, obstacles, and emotional stakes, giving Thelma’s journey both comic momentum and real dignity.
Craft Focus
- Genre translation: The script borrows action-thriller language, mission prep, pursuit, infiltration, escape, and sidekick dynamics, then scales those beats to Thelma’s physical reality.
- Character through routine: The opening carefully shows Thelma’s condo, technology habits, hearing aids, medication, needlepoint, and daily rituals before disrupting them with the scam.
- Agency as stakes: The money matters, but the deeper conflict is Thelma’s fear of being diminished, managed, or quietly reclassified by her family after one mistake.
- Comedy with tenderness: The screenplay finds laughs in age, technology, family anxiety, and physical limitation without turning Thelma into the joke.
Questions for Writers
- How does the opening email scene establish Thelma and Daniel’s bond before the scam plot begins?
- How does the Mission: Impossible material teach the audience how to read Thelma’s later quest?
- Where does the screenplay turn small obstacles, walking, hearing, texting, elevators, scooters, into action beats?
- How does Thelma’s decision to act come from shame, grief, independence, and anger all at once?
While reading, pay attention to how Thelma protects its hero’s dignity. The screenplay understands that age can be funny, frightening, limiting, and liberating all in the same scene. Its best trick is treating Thelma’s mission with the seriousness of a spy thriller while keeping the scale human: a sidewalk becomes a chase sequence, a scooter becomes a getaway vehicle, and one stubborn grandmother becomes Ethan Hunt with better snacks and a much more judgmental purse.
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Thelma (2024)
When 93-year-old Thelma Post gets duped by a phone scammer pretending to be her grandson, she sets out on a treacherous quest across the city to reclaim what was taken from her.
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