David and Lisa 1962

David Clemens is brought to a residential psychiatric treatment center by his apparently caring mother. He grows visibly upset at even a light touch from another resident, convinced that being touched can kill him. Inside this quiet, clinical world, he throws himself into his studies, with a singular fixation on clocks that borders on obsession. A chilling thread runs beneath the surface: he keeps having a recurring dream in which he murders people using a massive, inexorable clock.

He meets Lisa Brandt, a girl who lives with two facets of herself. One persona, Lisa, can speak only in rhymes, while the other, Muriel, is mute and writes instead of speaking. David forges a tentative connection with her by replying in verse, and this odd friendship draws him out just enough to start opening up to his psychiatrist, Dr. Alan Swinford. He also grows closer to another resident, Simon, a development that stirs Lisa’s jealousy and adds emotional tension to the center’s delicate social fabric. When his mother visits and their conversation escalates into an argument, Mrs. Clemens and the rest of David’s family decide that he should leave the program. He returns home, only to flee back to the center soon after, where staff reluctantly agree to let him stay again.

A breakthrough arrives when Lisa realizes that she is essentially two personalities occupying one body—Lisa and Muriel are the same person. This discovery deepens her longing to connect with David. She seeks him out, but he is distracted by Simon playing a Bach piece on the piano. In a moment of friction, Lisa activates the metronome, interrupting the music and provoking David’s anger. Lisa then slips away from the center and takes a train into Center City, Philadelphia, unseen by the staff. A desperate search ensues, but the morning light reveals a lead: she may have returned to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, a place where she had once embraced a statue of a mother and child.

David and Dr. Swinford hurry to the museum and find Lisa on the museum steps. Seeing David triggers a sense that she has found some measure of healing. In a pivotal, hopeful moment, she speaks to him in prose, and for the first time, David overcomes his fear of touch enough to let her hold his hand. Together, they descend the museum steps and begin their return journey, stepping toward a future that feels newly possible despite the shadows of the past.