Summary
A tempest-chewed schooner splinters against an obsidian reef; the single survivor, a taciturn sailor with cheekbones sharp enough to shave the moon, crawls ashore on an island that seems to have been sketched by a feverish Romantic. Palms hiss like green serpents; black sand drinks the salt from his wounds. Over the next hour of celluloid that feels excavated from a forgotten archive of dreams, the mariner discovers a half-buried cinema-projector, a crate of nitrate reels, and a village of shadow-people who emerge only when the tide is wrong. They screen fragments of their own drowned memories—lovers dissolving into spray, children turning to gulls, priests burning boats to keep the sea from listening. Our bedraggled protagonist, nameless but unforgettable, becomes both spectator and subject: each reel he threads pulls him deeper into an ontological undertow until his own skin begins to flicker at 16 frames per second. When he finally nails together a raft from the splintered confessionals of a ruined chapel, the ocean declines to let him leave; waves peel back like pages, revealing a mirrored floor where he confronts not himself but Edmund Linke—actor, author, marionette—who stares back with the same astonishment. The film ends on a match-cut: the sailor striking a magnesium flare, the screen itself catching fire, the spectator’s own reflection superimposed over a horizon that is neither rescue nor ruin, only the perpetual dissolve of emulsion into salt.
Synopsis
Director
Edmund Linke
