Disconnected 1984

Alicia is a young woman working at a video rental store in Waterbury, Connecticut, where the ordinary cadence of small-town life begins to fray at the edges. One afternoon, she is approached outside her apartment by an Old Man dressed in black who asks to use her phone. After they enter, the man strangely disappears, leaving Alicia shaken and puzzled. She shares the odd incident over drinks with her boyfriend, Mike, a local disc jockey, and with her glamorous twin sister, Barbara Ann. Both dismiss it as a strange coincidence, even as a darker thread begins to run through the town—the serial killer who preys on young women and draws the attention of Detective Tremaglio.

At the video store, Alicia encounters an awkward young man named Franklin who browses the shelves but insists he doesn’t own a video player. He flirts and then returns the next day to ask Alicia out, only to reveal that while he speaks with her, he is lying in bed with a woman’s bloody corpse. After their phone call ends, Franklin proceeds to have sex with the dead body. Days later, Alicia and Franklin go on a movie date and encounter Barbara Ann, who is also on a date. Alicia, needing to be up early the next morning, ends the date and heads home. Meanwhile, Franklin visits a bar, picks up another woman, and brings her back to his house, where he murders her after they are intimate, slashing through the illusion of normalcy with brutal certainty.

Alicia continues to be tormented by strange phone calls, voices that include unearthly sounds. Even after changing her number, the calls persist, gnawing at her mind as she experiences nightmare-like sequences in which Mike and Barbara Ann discuss the affairs as if they were real, all while she feels pulled into a waking nightmare she cannot escape. She agrees to another dinner with Franklin, and they sleep together again, but in the morning he plans to kill her—only to discover she has already left for work.

Barbara Ann reenters the picture, visiting Franklin and seducing him; after she performs oral sex on him, he murders her in cold blood. The very next morning, Alicia stops by his house again, finds Barbara Ann’s body, and is confronted by Franklin. Tremaglio and his partner patrol the neighborhood, and the tension spikes as Franklin insists he is not the serial killer. The truth comes in a brutal moment: Tremaglio and his partner shoot Franklin, ending his murderous spree in a blaze of gunfire.

Back at her apartment, a distraught Alicia sinks deeper into fear and doubt, plagued by the recurring phone calls and the sense that the killer may not be the lone predator after all. A disturbing radio report about another dead woman in town only compounds her anxiety, hinting at a broader pattern that dwarfs the already suffocating fear she feels. Her mental state deteriorates as she leans on Mike for support and briefly resumes their dating, trying to cling to some semblance of ordinary life. After a date, Mike makes a payphone call that seems to echo through the distance of the city, and Alicia is left to confront the haunting calls alone once more.

One morning, the old unease returns in a final, unsettling image: the elderly man she once let into her home is seen emerging from her apartment, a quiet sign that the danger—and the fear it embodies—may have followed her home. The film leaves her at a crossroads between trust and paranoia, illness and clarity, as the line between the real and the imagined becomes dangerously blurred. The town’s shadows linger, and Alicia’s world has expanded into a labyrinth of voices, faces, and consequences that refuse to fade.