After the tragic loss of the love of her life, an emotionally traumatized E.R. nurse finds herself drawn to a mysterious institute promising a way to reconvene with the dead. Soon, grief, obsession, and reality blur. And her fight for the truth spirals into a waking nightmare.

SYNOPSIS:

Mazzy Walker is a trauma nurse built from scar tissue. Decades ago, she survived a horrific car accident on a frozen Lake Tahoe that killed her parents while she watched—helpless—from the backseat. Since then, she’s mastered the art of staying emotionally unreachable, even while saving lives. But when she begins to open up to Kaleb Maier, a brilliant and tender-hearted tech founder with his own haunted edges, something fragile and real begins to thaw inside her.

Then Kaleb collapses. Suddenly. Mysteriously. Mazzy does everything right, every protocol. But he dies anyway. Within hours, his estranged father—Victor Maier, a revered and terrifying figure in tech—swoops in, claims the body, and has Kaleb cremated with no ceremony, no goodbye. Mazzy is left unmoored, grieving not just the man she loved, but the future they were just beginning to believe in.

In the days following his death, reality starts to come undone. Kaleb’s voice crackles through a dead phone. Their favorite songs play over the house’s smart system—unprompted. Then comes a message from Kasi, Kaleb’s estranged twin sister: “You’ve seen him too.” Kasi lives in their childhood home—a rotting mid-century time capsule in Marin—and reveals a secret Mazzy can’t rationalize: she and Kaleb shared a psychic link. And something of him is still reaching out. Still… alive.

As Mazzy digs deeper, she learns that Kaleb was experimenting with preserving consciousness—digitally. Victor’s secretive research facility, The Immer Institute, may have gone even further. What Mazzy first took as grief-induced hallucination might be evidence of something far more disturbing: Kaleb’s consciousness could still be active—somewhere. Visions intensify: Kaleb submerged beneath ice, calling to her. Mazzy's rational world crumbles under the weight of what she feels but can’t prove. Did Kaleb knowingly upload himself to escape death? Or was he taken—digitally resurrected by Victor as a prototype for something inhuman? As she confronts Kaleb’s ghost, his father’s god complex, and her own survivor’s guilt, Mazzy must choose between letting go or descending fully into the liminal space between love and madness.

In the end, Hereafter is not about whether Kaleb is dead or alive, but about what remains when someone we love is gone. A haunting blend of grief horror, romantic longing, and techno-existentialism, the film asks: What if the afterlife isn't beyond this world, but inside it—in the now, in coming to terms with loss and embracing fleeting, fragile beauty wherever (and whenever) it exists.

HEREAFTER