Anguish 2015

Lucy Amberley Gridley and her mother Sarah are driving along a quiet road when Lucy asks if she can go on a camping trip. When Sarah refuses, Lucy angrily exits the car and is struck by an oncoming vehicle, a sudden tragedy that looms over the beginnings of the story.

Meanwhile, Tess is a teenage girl who has long wrestled with what looks like mental instability. She has moved into a new house with her mother Jessica in search of a fresh start. As Tess and Jessica settle in, Tess wheels her skateboard past the very road where Lucy was hit, pausing before a roadside cross bearing Lucy’s picture. An unseen force seems to push Tess down into the dirt, trapping her there and making it feel like she cannot leave. She eventually rises and makes her way home, but soon begins to experience phenomena that she insists are more than simple hallucinations.

Tess eventually crosses paths with Sarah’s bookstore, where she says something to Sarah that only Lucy could know. This moment raises serious questions for Sarah and blurs the line between memory and reality. As Tess grapples with what she’s experiencing, she is forced to confront them—she even looks into a mirror and sees her eye color shift from blue to brown, over and over, a quiet, unsettling sign that something is unsettled inside her.

After what appears to be a mental breakdown, Tess collapses at the front door just as Jessica returns from work. She is hospitalized, placed under constant supervision, medicated, and enrolled in therapy. A priest from Jessica’s church visits and suggests that possession might be involved, adding another layer of mystery to Tess’s ordeal.

Tess is discharged and returns to her bedroom to find that Jessica has boarded up the window for Tess’s protection. Yet the strange, otherworldly disturbances persist, and Tess, who refuses to eat, is driven into town by Jessica—only to bolt from the car and run toward Lucy’s home. There she embraces Sarah, while Jessica watches in confusion and fear.

Inside Lucy’s bedroom, Sarah explains a difficult possibility: Tess may have a gift that allows spirits to channel through her body so they can say goodbye to their loved ones and move on. Sarah believes that Lucy’s spirit has begun to inhabit Tess’s body, and her aim is to communicate with Lucy so she can move on. At first, Lucy speaks through Tess, saying she doesn’t want to leave; she’s tired of doctors and medicine, but Sarah urges that moving on is the right path, and Lucy eventually consents.

Lucy does leave Tess’s body, but another spirit appears and lunges from the bed, prompting Sarah and Jessica to lock Tess in the basement for safety. Jessica goes downstairs to check on Tess, only to be confronted by the figure within Tess; Lucy reenters Tess’s body and pleads to see her mother once more.

Lucy asks for one more night with her mother, and Jessica agrees. After that night, Sarah tells Lucy that it’s time to move on, and Lucy exits Tess’s body, finding herself in a shimmering spirit world where she encounters Tess, who reveals she wants to go back and hugs Lucy. An invisible force attacks Lucy, and a bright light signals that Lucy has moved on. Tess returns to her own body, and life seems to return to a fragile normalcy—her mother remains unsure whether Tess has truly improved. Later, in a coffee shop, Tess is asked for her name but does not reply. Back at home, Tess sits playing a song she learned from Lucy on a guitar; as she plays, her eye color shifts again from blue to brown, hinting that Lucy’s presence and the journey they shared have left a lasting trace on Tess. The ending leaves a quiet sense that the boundary between the living and the departed has shifted for Tess and for Lucy’s memory.