Summary
A restless silhouette named Doris Moore—half society orchid, half feral spark—slips through the chrysalis of Park-Avenue privilege when she overhears her industrialist uncle plotting to sell the family’s munitions empire to a cartel of European war-buzzards. She steals the incriminating contract, vanishes into the night, and boards a westbound night-train that barrels through a thunderstorm like Thor’s own hammer. Somewhere beyond the Alleghenies the locomotive derails inside a tunnel; steel shrieks, sparks geyser, and when the smoke clears Doris is the only passenger unaccounted for. The newspapers print her obituary while she, bruised but breathing, claws through a fissure in the tunnel wall and emerges into a moonlit ravine where a clandestine village of outcasts—bohemians, anarchist printers, and deserters—has built a candle-lit republic of second chances. There she reinvents herself as ‘Dove,’ a name whispered like contraband. Over the next months she learns typesetting, tends bartered beehives, and falls into a slow-burning pas de deux with Rowan Vale, a photojournalist who himself fled a court-martial for exposing the same arms ring. Their fragile utopia is ruptured when a Pinkerton posse, tipped off by a jealous poet, dynamites the ravine entrance. Doris escapes with Rowan’s glass-plate negatives—evidence that could topple dynasties—only to discover that her uncle has used her presumed death to seize the family trust and betroth her cousin to a Balkan prince in a deal sealed by the very weapons contract she once tried to bury. The final act ricochets between a torch-lit masquerade on a Long Island estate and the boiler room of a trans-Atlantic liner where Doris confronts her uncle, torches the contract, and steps backward through a porthole into black water, clutching the negatives like a newborn cosmos. The film ends not with a body but with a dissolve: a newsboy hurls broadsheets onto dawn-lit cobblestones, headlines screaming ‘HEIRESS TURNS PHANTOM—WALL STREET TITAN INDICTED,’ while somewhere a woman in a fraying cloak buys passage to Valparaíso with coins she earned setting type.
