Why
An audience does not track difficulty. It tracks two people who cannot both get what they came for.
A scene where someone is merely in the way has one position in it. The protagonist pushes, the obstacle yields or does not, and whatever happens is a matter of force rather than choice. Nothing is negotiable, because there is nothing to negotiate with — you cannot bargain with a locked door, a deadline, or a colleague who agrees with you and is wrong about the method.
The specific trap is a person who is present without opposing. It survives every naive check, because a name appears in the obstacle line and a human being is doing something. Read what they want, though, and it turns out to be what the protagonist wants. Then the scene is a misunderstanding, and misunderstandings end when someone explains — which is why those scenes go slack in the middle and finish on a line of clarification.
Pressure is real and useful. A clock, a rule, a place that will not let you stay: these raise the cost of everything in the scene. They cannot generate one. Pressure decides how hard a scene is; opposition decides whether it is a scene.
And sometimes the honest answer is that a film has no antagonist — a story about a fight already won, a grief nobody is contesting, a system that has stopped noticing. That is a legitimate structure and a hard one, because everything an opponent would have supplied has to be carried by something else. It is worth doing on purpose and never worth doing by accident, so it is a claim to be argued rather than a gap to be excused.
How
- Write what the obstacle WANTS, as a sentence beginning "wants". Not what they do, not what they believe — what they are trying to get in this room.
- Read it beside the protagonist's objective and ask whether both can be satisfied. If they can, you have pressure, not opposition, and the scene needs a different obstacle or a different objective.
- If the obstacle is mistaken rather than opposed, give them a stake of their own: something they lose if the protagonist wins. Tunde protecting Marek is delay; Tunde protecting his own section in front of a critic is a scene.
- If the obstacle is a condition, find the person it is happening through. A deadline is a person who set it, an eviction is a person who signed it, a rule is a person enforcing it who could choose not to.
- Where no such person exists, say so deliberately: what the absence buys the film, and what the film has to carry in its place. If you cannot name both, the absence is an accident.
- Count them across the whole script. One scene of pure pressure is texture; half of them means the film is being pushed rather than fought, and no individual scene will show you that.