Summary
Deep in the kudzu-choked Alabama hinterlands, Garnett—once genteel, now gnawed by disgrace—presides over The Owl, a dilapidated road-house where moonshine and murmurs flow in equal measure. His mother, sightless and saintly, cradles a porcelain fiction: her boy perished heroically in the Great War. Only Dr. Hamilton, a healer whose hands tremble more than his ethics, shares the truth. When a coven of hooded phantoms strings a noose for Garnett one humid midnight, Hamilton’s scalpel-sharp conscience severs the rope, spiriting the fugitive into a thicket of magnolia and regret. The physician’s mistress, Faith—luminous, enigmatic—becomes both courier and cipher in a hunt for Garnett’s estranged wife, a quest spurred by a fever that chars his veins. Yet the trail coils inward: Faith is the vanished bride, her memory scrubbed by guilt, her allegiance split between the man she was sworn to and the doctor who stitched her new life. In a candle-lit reckoning inside The Owl’s skeletal ballroom, identities collapse like wet parchment; Hamilton realizes he has medicated his friend toward death while bedding the very antidote Garnett craves. The film ends on a fog-shrouded pier, steamboat whistle keening, as Garnett—blood on his lips, absolution in his gaze—beckons Faith toward the black water, Hamilton left clutching the echo of his own treachery.
Synopsis
A bitter outcast named Garnett runs a road house of low character called "The Owl" in backwoods Alabama, his only friend is Dr. Hamilton, and he keeps the secret from his old blind mother who believes he had a noble death. One night, the Doctor intervenes when the KKK tries to hang Garnett. Hamilton tells his patient turned girlfriend, Faith, that he must find Garnett's wife before his rampant illness kills him. He finds that Faith is in fact the missing wife, and he has betrayed his old friend.
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