A disillusioned art critic in New York City tries to unravel the mystery behind a 19^th-century Symbolist painting and a scholar who mirrors his obsession in order to keep his sanity after a museum encounter awakens a malevolent presence.

SYNOPSIS:

Infierno: A Study of Death and Silence is a psychological thriller (with elements of horror) film set in New York’s art world, where beauty, scholarship, and dread begin to collapse into one another.

Joshua Baxter is a respected but increasingly alienated art critic whose career has settled into a kind of intellectual exhaustion. At a museum exhibition devoted to 19th-century German symbolism, he encounters a painting by Arnold Böcklin that seems to exert an unsettling pull on him. The work feels less like an artifact than a presence; one that has been waiting for him. There, he meets Abigail Wheelwright, an incisive Columbia researcher whose own relationship to the painting is more personal and more mysterious than it first appears. Their connection is immediate, charged, and difficult to read.

As Joshua begins to spend more time with Abigail, his sense of reality starts to fray. Strange sounds, recurring images, and a growing fixation on the painting begin to seep into his private life, threatening the careful distance he has spent years maintaining. What starts as curiosity becomes obsession, and what begins as attraction becomes something far more dangerous. The deeper Joshua is drawn into Abigail’s orbit and into the strange frequency surrounding the painting, the more the boundaries between art, memory, desire, and death begin to dissolve.

Set against the architecture of museums, apartments, lecture halls, and late-night New York streets, Infierno is a moody, intimate horror story about the terror of recognition. The moment when a work of art seems to look back at you. It is a film about grief, repression, and the seduction of the unknown, unfolding with a quiet elegance that gradually gives way to emotional and psychological collapse.

As Joshua is forced to confront the meaning of the painting and the truth buried beneath his own detachment, he must decide whether what he is experiencing is madness, revelation, or something far more ancient and unforgiving.