In a Naturalist's Garden

A lone lepidopterist, C.L. Chester, drifts through a crumbling manor where topiary moths outnumber the dwindling human voices; the film’s taciturn narrative charts his slow surrender to a garden that digests memories petal by petal. Over thirteen lunar cycles he collects specimens, yet each pinned butterfly releases a ghost—deceased parents, a vanished fiancée, comrades lost in unnamed wars—until the flora itself begins to exhale their final conversations. The estate’s glasshouses warp into echo chambers: orchids whisper court-martial transcripts, vines braid noose-knots, and the once-pristine reflecting pool calcifies into a chalky manuscript of calcium regrets. Chester’s sole confidant, a feral boy who communicates in bird trills, leads him deeper into an topiary labyrinth where the hedges sculpt themselves into faces that bleed sap when touched. In the penultimate reel the protagonist confronts a monumental sunflower whose spirals match the bullet-crease on his skull; inside its seedy cathedral he hallucinates his own autopsy performed by root systems. Dawn finds him metamorphosed—half man, half chrysalis—swinging from a wisteria noose that blossoms in real time, the garden’s final triumph over the taxonomies that once caged it.