After waking up on a slowly sinking cargo ship with no memory of how she got there and no way off, Steph must work with four other women to survive the ship’s mysterious rules before it drags them under.
Deadweight is a dark comedy about five women trapped on a slowly sinking cargo ship. When Steph arrives with no memory of how she got there, she discovers the other four women have already been surviving the ship’s strange rules for… who knows how long? No one knows why they’re there. No one agrees on how to survive. Breaking the rules has consequences. Each woman brings her own coping strategy. Steph (45, relentlessly polite event planner) is the newcomer, clinging to optimism & manners. Louisa (37, ex-paramedic, single mom) tries to impose order through checklists & control. Esme (30, academic dropout) deflects with flirtation & detachment. Gail (60s, former professor turned spiritualist) searches for meaning in every leak & vision. Nix (20s, quiet & watchful) seems to understand the ship better than anyone. Episodes center on practical crises: rot, missing rations, strange tunnels, haunting noises… forcing the women to collaborate & occasionally implode. Flashbacks reveal the lives they left behind: what they’ve lost, what they’re hiding, the moments that shaped them. As the ship deteriorates, the rules begin to reveal themselves… & the women slowly realize the ship may not just be trapping them. It may be testing them. The emotional engine of Deadweight is transformation. It’s about watching these women unravel, bond, fracture, & sometimes heal. The narrative engine is the puzzle: What is the ship? How do you get off? What happens if you do? Layered throughout is dark comedy. Whether it’s chore-chart wars, arguments over blanket piles, or trying to extinguish a fire with a lint roller, Deadweight finds absurdity in crisis & humanity amidst chaos. On the surface, it’s a surreal ensemble comedy about strangers trapped in a liminal space, trying not to lose their shit. Beneath that surface, it’s a metaphor for surviving cancer (or any life-altering trauma) wrapped in a puzzlebox show. It captures the feeling of waking up in a body & world you no longer recognize, where the rules have changed & no one hands you a map. It’s about reckoning, absurdity, black humor, isolation… the unexpected bond between the people who make it through. Equal parts funny, unsettling, yet deeply human, Deadweight explores how trauma exposes who we really are… and how connection and laughter might be the only things that keep us afloat.
Abby Berendt Lavoi is an award-winning Writer, Director and Producer. She directed the multi-award-winning feature documentary Roots of Fire which earned the prestigious Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Documentary of the Year Award and screened at over 25 film festivals. She is currently in development on the sequel, and in production on an episodic spinoff series, Dry Bones. She was the Showrunner of the 12 episode half-hour unscripted streaming series, My Amazing Cheap Date. Her work has screened at over 35 film festivals and has received awards and honors from the New Orleans Film Festival, Hot Springs Doc Fest, SIFF, Hawaii International Film Festival, SFIndieFest, Indie Memphis, the Telly Awards, Promax, and many others. Her TV staff credits include MTV, TVLand, Nick@Nite, Nickelodeon, and Current TV. Her screenwriting work has been recognized at Austin Film Festival, CineStory, and Stowe Story Labs. In 2021, she was awarded the Women in Film and Television’s Resilient Woman Award. Her series, It’s a Rough Life, was a finalist in the 2014 NYTVF History Channel Unscripted Development Pipeline. Her team won Best Film at the San Francisco 48 Hour Film Festival in 2012, and in 2011 she won Best Editor at Mockfest for the film Rolled, which she also produced. Since 2008, she has successfully run Lavoi Creative, a full service creative agency and production studio.
