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.

She appears first as a pale head rising from the ocean. Then in his neighbor's window, her lips moving in a silent mumble. In the mirror during an ancient purification ritual, she mirrors his movements, he raises a burner of sacred smoke, she raises her lamp. Water follows her wherever she goes: puddles on the floor, wet footprints tracking through the house, a small stream rushing down the aisle of a London subway car before her pale eyes find him from across the train.

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 occur during the next crescent moon. She suggests visiting his parents to reconcile with them. He travels to London to confront his father, but a tense dinner explodes into an argument, his father forbids him from coming home again.

With nowhere else to go, Kalim stays at his friend Mohammad's apartment. The next morning, Mohammad discovers his relapse, leading to a violent altercation that breaks Mohammad's nose and lands him in the hospital.

The haunting intensifies. The ghostly woman appears on the subway, drifting toward him, her lamp flickering aggressively. Her dry voice finally speaks in Arabic: "You can't run from yourself anymore." Kalim screams at her in front of horrified passengers. She vanishes, leaving only a puddle of water and Kalim's shame.

Kalim returns to Marseille, consumed by guilt and still unresolved.

He isolates himself at a beach, gets high, and falls off a cliff, nearly drowning. His neighbor Sabina finds him, bandages his wounds, and shares a quiet moment with him, revealing her own fear of the ocean and how she learned to face it. Her story plants a seed: it's never too late to confront things.

Kalim returns home and, for the first time, confesses everything to Zayn, his addiction, his relapse, his fears. Zayn admits he was terrified Kalim would disappear on him. In an act of accountability, Kalim flushes the remaining pills. Zayn holds him. They reconcile.

That night, Kalim astral projects to the beach. The ghostly woman is waiting, her lamp glowing against the darkness. She speaks to him in Arabic, guiding him to a truth he's been running from: the only way to stop drowning is to face what's been buried. She leads him to a decrepit version of his fifteen-year-old self. Kalim kneels in the sand and holds him.

The boy dissolves into him, not destroyed, but integrated. 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.