Neptune's Bride

A phosphorescent tide coils around a moon-drenched pier where gaunt Jack Dougherty, barnacled in grief, bargains with the brine: exchange a living heart for the drowned face of Anita Meredith, the chanteuse who vanished during the last brass-note of the pier’s ballroom orchestra. Richard Melfield’s itinerant lantern-seller shadows him like a conscience made of tallow, peddling lights that reveal more than they banish—each flare shows barnacled stairs descending into a cathedral of kelp where Dadie Rarvey’s matriarchal lighthouse-keeper keeps a logbook of every soul the sea has ever kissed. Up on the esplanade, carnival barker Thornton Edwards auctions off “guaranteed immortality” in glass jars while Mary Dodge’s cinematograph projects flickering evidence that tomorrow has already happened; Lucille Best and Al McKinnon play mirror-clad twins who speak only in tide-tongued palindromes, their reflections multiplying until the boardwalk becomes a Möbius strip of pleading faces. Caroline Howard Scott’s journalist arrives with a typewriter whose ribbon bleats seawater, chronicling how Pearl West’s society doll, Maude Howe’s morphine-addled nurse, and Joseph Havel’s one-armed juggler each trade a secret for a shell that sighs the missing Meredith’s final song. When the lagoon at last belches up a bridal gown stitched with bioluminescent squid-ink, the gown walks—empty yet curvaceous—hunting the man who promised betrothal to the abyss. Leslie T. Peacocke’s screenplay refuses closure: the last frame freezes on Dougherty’s silhouette being stitched into the horizon by Roxy Armstrong’s sewing-machine, while Elsa Erlicher’s calliope plays a waltz whose final note is the sound of every viewer’s pulse drowning.