How much longer can you run from yourself?
Logline
After surviving a car crash that kills his grandparents and being estranged from his homophobic father, a songwriter haunted by a ghost must confront years of addiction and suppressed trauma.
Synopsis (with spoilers)
Kalim, a songwriter living in Marseille, has spent fifteen years burying the trauma of a car crash that killed his grandparents and the emotional abuse from his homophobic father. When his estranged father suffers a heart attack and still refuses to speak to him, the buried grief surfaces—manifesting as nightmares, out-of-body experiences, and a ghostly woman with a flickering lamp who begins to stalk him everywhere.
As the haunting escalates, Kalim's grip on reality slips. He relapses into the pill addiction that nearly killed him in college. His best friend, Zia, performs a Turkish coffee reading and foretells a spiritual calling that will happen during the next crescent moon. She also suggests visiting his parents to reconcile with them. He then travels to London to confront his father, only to be rejected again. His other friend, Mohammad, discovers his relapse, resulting in a violent altercation.
Back in Marseille, Kalim isolates himself at a beach, getting high and falling off a cliff near the ocean, almost killing himself. A couple help bandage Kalim’s face and tell him “it all depends on how you take care of your wounds”, he realizes he needed to stop running from himself and face his past. He comes home and confesses everything to Zayn before he flushes the remaining pills away.
At night, Kalim astral projects again and is led towards the ghostly woman on the beach. She leads him to a truth he's been running from: the only way to stop drowning is to face what's been buried. On the night of the crescent moon, she guides him to a decrepit version of his younger self. Kalim kneels in the sand, and confronts his past self. The boy dissolves into him. The woman vanishes.
Kalim returns to bed, wraps his arms around his sleeping boyfriend, and for the first time in fifteen years, drifts into a dreamless sleep, freed from the chains of the past.