Sodom and Gomorrah

A bacchanalian fever-dream in marble and moonlight, the film opens on Jackson Harber’s Xanadu of gilded domes and perfumed labyrinths where champagne cataracts spill over alabaster balustrades. His betrothed, Mary—a mannequin of porcelain allure—floats through corridors of peacock fans and narcotic jazz, her engagement ring a manacle of diamonds. From Cambridge arrives Eduard, trailing a cassocked tutor who sniffs sulfur in every saxophone riff. The sculptor Harry Lighton, chisel still warm from marble thighs, pleads for Mary’s escape; rejected, he turns the gun on himself, the bullet carving a red comma across the white page of his chest. Mary collapses into a dream that detonates history: she becomes Lot’s restless wife, slipping from salt-crusted sheets into the incense-choked temples of Astarte where priests bruise bodies into prayer. An androgynous angel with eyes like extinguished stars herds the reluctant couple from a city already cracking along its fault lines of vice. At the threshold of annihilation she glances back—curiosity sharper than brimstone—and petrifies into a crystalline effigy. The dream’s salt crust still clinging to her lashes, Mary awakens, flees the orgiastic masque, and races through dawn-streaked streets toward the hospital where Harry’s pulse flickers like a candle in an abattoir.