Washington's Ax

FLYNN

People like the idea of belonging to something. Having a secret just brings them together.

Noah seems unconvinced.

FLYNN (con’t)

You don’t agree?

NOAH

No. I get it. I just don’t like secrets. I think they drive people apart.

-From the screenplay WASHINGTON’S AX

Noah Kensington is a young man with a secret… a secret that even he doesn’t know he has.

Moving out on his own for the first time, he is struggling to become something more than the sum of where he comes from and what his major is. Of what team he supports, what movies he likes and what music he listens to.

But Noah is about to discover that we don’t always get to decide who we are. That pieces of our lives can be ripped away and replaced by strangers… by friends… and by family. And that the people we think we know, may not be who we think they are.

In each of our lives, there is a time when we are confronted with learning who we really are. A time when we either chose to be the man or woman that we want to be, or else let society and circumstance decide for us.

For Noah that time comes with a shattering discovery that his father is not the man he thought he was. That his mother is living a lie. A time when Noah discovers that everything he thought he was - is taken away, and everything he thought he would be - seems beyond reach. If only Noah can hold on to the present, in the face of a secret that threatens to destroy him.

A nagging suspicion becomes a growing doubt. And doubt becomes a tortuous certainty. A father’s crime becomes the son’s guilt. And keeping the secret threatens to destroy the very people it was meant to protect.

When a serial killer is caught, everyone is surprised to find out that he was the kind of quiet family man that no one would suspect. But how could his family not have known?

Suddenly, he is no longer Noah; the Music Major. Now he is Noah; The Son of the Serial Killer. To is friends, his teachers, even to his girlfriend… Noah is the one who has changed. And in the moment when Noah loses the past he thought he knew – he also loses the present that he thought he had, and the future he will never reach.