After her twin dies in a tragic fire, a withdrawn young woman flees a broken system and
spirals into a disturbing ritual of bodily control; her grief burrows inward in a haunting descent
through trauma, obsession, and the quiet fight to reclaim her identity.

SYNOPSIS:

In Tabor Falls, Rhode Island...

Told through the internal narration of AVIVA, a perceptive yet emotionally blunted young woman,

the story traces her and her twin sister, AOROA, as they flee the slow erosion of institutional care in

search of refuge. They land in the rusting trailer of a former friend, JULES, only to be drawn into

the orbit of Jules' boyfriend, TYLER, a charismatic older man whose façade soon fractures. What

emerges is not a traditional crime story but a psychological excavation: one that implicates not only

the predator but the systems and silences that allow him to operate unchecked. After a harrowing

discovery and an act of exposure, Aviva watches her world collapse in a sudden and devastating fire

that kills her sister and leaves her adrift. What follows is a meditative descent into grief and

dissociation, marked by a creeping obsession with infestation and bodily contamination. Amid this

psychological unraveling, she forms a bond with CHARLIE, an emotionally stunted but sharply

attuned boy whose own abuse is veiled in wit and withdrawal. Their connection is not romantic or

redemptive; it is fleeting, jagged, and quietly human. When Charlie dies by suicide, his absence

carries forward as both an echo and an unanswered question: What does it mean to have mattered,

even briefly? In the wake of Charlie’s death and Aviva's pregnancy, her psyche becomes a site of

intrusion, decay, and buried memory. She adopts a sick dog infested with parasites and begins a

tapeworm diet in secret, convinced on some level that something hollow and gnawing inside her

must be named, fed, and purged. The metaphor is not only physical; it becomes spiritual,

psychological, and cinematic, echoing a trauma that survives by burrowing into the body and hiding

in plain sight.

Parasitosis is structured through the scaffolding of voiceover narration, with Aviva’s voice carrying

us through the bulk of the narrative. Her tone is raw, introspective, and occasionally lyrical,

observing trauma from within its epicenter. But late in the film, a second voice begins to surface: not

forcefully, but gently, asking, affirming, listening. In the film’s closing moments, we realize Aviva has

been telling this story aloud, in the quiet of an after-hours counseling room, to her adult daughter,

now a therapist at the same Rhode Island community center where Aviva once sat in silence. The

daughter’s presence reframes the entire narrative as an act of intergenerational articulation: a woman

finding the courage to speak and a daughter shaped by that speaking. In her, Charlie's quiet longing

to matter is finally fulfilled, not through biography, but through impact. She becomes not a product

of rot but of resilience.

Steeped in metaphor and symbolic undercurrent, Parasitosis uses the language of infestation and

bodily intrusion, real, imagined, and self-inflicted, as a lens through which to explore guilt, survival,

and the slow restoration of autonomy. The tone recalls works such as Aftersun, Never Rarely Sometimes

Always, and Swallow, films that live in emotional ambiguity, refuse catharsis for its own sake, and

trust audiences to sit inside silence without flinching. For audiences drawn to cinema that privileges

silence over spectacle, Parasitosis is something singular. It doesn’t follow genre; it reshapes it, using

horror not to provoke fear but to excavate feeling. Its tension coils inward, its violence is spectral,

and its impact accumulates like memory. The story is intimate, contained, and deeply performance-focused.