The Devil Lives in a Bottle

Format	Short Screenplay
Genre	Drama
Status	Completed Festival Submissions
Logline	A child bears witness to a father’s carefully managed alcoholism, and the quiet damage it leaves behind.
Synopsis	Set in Northern England in the 1980s, The Devil Lives in a Bottle is told through the eyes of nine-year-old Dylan, growing up in a household shaped by his father’s alcoholism. Moments of warmth and play sit uneasily beside volatility and fear, as ordinary domestic spaces kitchens, bedrooms, cars , become unpredictable terrain. Dylan does not fully understand what is happening around him, but he feels it deeply: the shifts in tone, the silences, the rituals that form as his family adapts to an unspoken danger. Anchored in observation rather than explanation, the film traces how a child absorbs trauma quietly, carrying both love and confusion forward. As the bottle empties, consequences accumulate, leading to a rupture that forever alters the family’s shape. The Devil Lives in a Bottle is not a story about addiction itself, but about what it leaves behind, and how children continue to live, play, and grow alongside it.