Snakes

In a rust-eaten railway depot, somewhere between dusk and dissolution, a crate of serpents—imported for a carnival that never arrived—spills open like Pandora’s box with scales. The stationmaster’s runaway daughter, a flapper with smudged kohl and a laugh sharp enough to cut tin, pockets one of the snakes as if it were a stolen kiss. What follows is a hallucinatory nighttown odyssey: a moonlit tango with a blind herpetologist who swears he can read braille on the belly of every viper; a baptism-by-bite inside a derelict church where the pews have been chopped up for kindling; a slow-motion chase through a paper-flower cemetery where each headstone is painted with the face of someone still living. The film never tells you whether the reptiles are real, or whether they are the guilt of every sinner in this nameless port town given forked tongues. By the time dawn bleaches the sky, the girl is wrapped in a coat of living snakes, her eyes twin black pearls, while the locomotive whistle—now a scream, now a lullaby—carries her south toward an ocean that might swallow her whole.