Experimental Film

Former film teacher Lois Cairns is struggling to raise her autistic son, Clark, while freelancing as an independent film critic when, at a screening, she sees an independent film that contains several clips from a longer reel of silver nitrate silent footage. As a film historian, she is able to connect the “borrowed” footage to the early work of Mrs. Iris Dunlopp Whitcomb, the spiritualist and collector of fairy tales who mysteriously disappeared from a moving train in 1918. Hoping to make her own mark on the film world, Lois embarks on a project to prove that Whitcomb was Canada’s first female filmmaker. But her research takes her down a path not of darkness but of light—the blinding and searing light of a fairy tale made flesh, a daylight demon who demands service and adulation. As Lois discovers terrifying parallels between her own life and that of Mrs. Whitcomb, she begins to fear not just for herself, but for those closest to her, especially her son.