Houston, 1995. The shadows curate a drug dealer's bathtub confession and a teenage girl's final diary entry—two deaths, two months apart—into one story. His downward spiral is the performance. The contagion: one kiss, three words, a grief that kills after he's gone.

SYNOPSIS:

SPOON-FED ADDICTION

The Curator: In a dust-choked bedroom in 1995 Houston, a Shadow sits at a desk. It wears the shape of a dead girl, Angela, and it is reading her diary. It is here to recount the story of how it arrived—a story curated from the wreckage of two lives destroyed two months apart.

The Performance: The Shadow replays the tape of Adiran, a drug dealer and lost soul who turned his life into a theater of self-destruction. We watch his night through the distorted lens of LSD and grief as he moves through the neon-lit streets of Alief, fueled by the guilt of a lover (Veronica) he let fall to her death. When his friend Mary is murdered at a party he wasn't at, Adiran drags her grieving witness, Seth, into a massacre disguised as revenge. But the violence is just noise.

The Infection: The true purpose of Adiran's journey is to find a new vessel. Wounded and dying, he visits Angela's window. She has defended him to her family, weathered their scorn for loving him. She opens the window. She invites him in. Under the guise of a romantic farewell, Adiran plants the seed—a kiss and three words—that allows the darkness to slide from his body into hers.

The Trap: Adiran dies in his bathtub, drowned by Angela's father, Sheriff Sterling. The shadows crawl up Sterling's arm as he kills. Angela spends the next two months in a house with the boy who infected her gone, and the father who killed him, carrying the same darkness. There is no clean air left.

The Feeding: Two months later, the shadows take Adiran's shape. They visit Angela in bed. She welcomes them, believing her love has returned. They say "Breathe." She obeys. She dies.

The Shadow remains, sitting in Angela's room, finishing the story of how it was fed. Awaiting their next invitation.

SPOON-FED ADDICTION