Following a traumatizing event, teenager Rowan goes to stay at her estranged aunt’s oceanside home. In her distressed state she finds herself seeking out increasingly bizarre, violent internet content, and soon becomes obsessed by videos of a missing woman known only as Fish Tooth, who she believes is calling out through the screen for help. Despite a budding relationship with her camgirl neighbour, Alex, Rowan’s obsession will lead her to something sinister lurking at the bottom of a twisted internet rabbit hole…
GRIMMFEST SAYS: Combining coming-of-age romance, historical mystery, and ghost story, Zack Ogle and Aaron Pagniano’s startling, unsettling, deeply disorientating feature is both a powerful exploration of trauma, its legacies, and the coping mechanisms it generates, and a lucid and gripping examination of the seductive and dangerous nature of forbidden imagery that harks back to such classic narratives as VIDEODROME, Iván Zulueta’s Spanish cult classic ARREBATO [RAPTURE], and such novels as Theodore Rozsak’s FLICKER and Tim Lucas’ THROAT SPROCKETS. Making fine use of the starkly beautiful Long Island Sound locations to provide a very concrete – yet oddly liminal – sense of place, and with the excellent performances and strong chemistry of its two leads to anchor and give real emotional weight to the narrative, the filmmakers are able to construct a carefully considered and complex visual palette that reflects the film’s wider themes. Whether it be the various disturbing online content that first pull the protagonist in, all of it created by various performer friends of the filmmakers, or the pitch-perfect pastiche of Richard Kern’s infamous 80s Underground film YOU KILLED ME FIRST in the film clips introducing the mysterious ‘Fish Tooth’ girl, this is a thrillingly, chillingly cineliterate study of the lasting power of the illicitly obtained image, and of the dark and dangerous things that might be lurking behind the lens.