The Submarine Kid 2016

Spencer Koll, a Spencer Koll Marine who has just returned home from a harrowing deployment, struggles to find his footing in civilian life. He tries to reconnect with his circle of friends and his girlfriend Emily, but the echoes of what he lived through keep pulling him away from the ordinary moments of everyday life. The weight of what he experienced during the war shadows every room he enters, every conversation he has, and every plan he makes for the future.

Spencer’s world becomes even more complicated when he meets Alice, a woman who seems to offer him a sense of peace and a new kind of light. To him, Alice feels like everything he’s been missing, a beacon in the fog of his memories. But Alice also comes with a heavy, haunting presence: a ghost from the war that follows him, a figure who refuses to fade away. At a party, Alice introduces him to the story of the Submarine Kid, weaving memory, myth, and longing into a single, unsettling thread that pulls at the seams of his reality.

As the night unfolds, Spencer’s fragility clashes with his friends’ concerns. Outside, a tense encounter turns into a violent outburst when he confronts the instigator of a fight, driven by a flashback he cannot control. The violence spills over into the car ride with Alice, during which her screams mix with his panic, and the drive becomes a perilous journey toward a shore that seems to blur the line between memory and dream. The couple arrives at Thunder Lake, where Spencer tries to regain composure and even showcases a driving maneuver on a road that skirts the water. The moment turns intimate as Spencer and Alice share a charged connection, and he declares that he never wants to leave her. But the world tilts again when he attempts the maneuver a second time and loses control, crashing through a fence and plunging into Thunder Lake.

When Spencer wakes in a hospital, he fears the unthinkable: that Alice has died because of what he did. Yet no one seems to know who Alice is or where she went, leaving him to face the unsettling possibility that she exists only when he’s submerged in fear or drowning within his own mind. He begins to realize that Alice is tied to his underwater moments, a ghostly presence that appears to him when he suffocates, or when the line between waking and dreaming grows thin. In his struggle to escape the nightmarish loop, he clings to the idea that by holding his breath longer and longer, he might join her in whatever afterlife she inhabits. Each near-drowning episode deepens the concern of his family, including Mr. Koll and Mrs. Koll, who watch as his mental state continues to deteriorate.

A chilling revelation arrives: Alice is revealed to be the ghost of the Submarine Kid’s girlfriend, a haunting tie between Spencer’s present pain and a past tragedy. Alice urges him to abandon the self-destructive path, insisting that no world can be perfect and that he cannot escape his memories by drowning himself to be with her. Her argument rattles him, but the truth she embodies begins to reshape his understanding of the war’s aftermath.

After his discharge, a new, sharper flashback erupts, pulling Spencer back into the foreign country where his squad operated. Radios fail, orders blur, and a moment of moral ambiguity unfolds: he believes he is being ordered to shoot militants but is told not to. In the chaos, he shoots and kills a woman used as a human shield by a militant—the hallucination that has haunted him in waking life. The squad retreats, and Spencer is wounded and dragged out of danger, a moment that seals his trauma into memory.

The next morning, his friends find him at Thunder Lake, still attempting to drown himself as if the lake could swallow the past. In the midst of this crisis, Alice appears again, this time in a wedding dress, waiting beneath a boardwalk for the Submarine Kid. Spencer arrives, confessing that he wants to stay with Alice forever, but she reveals that their union cannot mend what has happened. The wedding is not meant for him, and they cannot move forward while they cling to one another. He asks Alice to time his drowning, hoping for an escape that won’t come, while the real world’s clock ticks on.

In a raw, cinematic turn, Spencer’s friends and family search for him as he drifts underwater. He encounters the Submarine Kid’s skeletal remains beneath the surface, a grim reminder of the war’s cost. Back in the dream, he resurfaces in his combat uniform, confronting the ghostly woman he killed while deployed. The realization lands hard: he cannot outrun his emotional trauma by fleeing underwater. He returns to the world above with the Submarine Kid’s goggles in hand—the final, symbolic relic of a man wrestling with memory.

In the closing, Spencer leaves the goggles on Thunder Lake’s shore, a quiet gesture that allows Alice’s ghost to move on beside the Submarine Kid. It’s a reluctant acceptance that healing won’t come from drowning the past, but from acknowledging it, returning to the land of the living, and letting the memories take their place in a life that must go on. The story lingers on the fragile boundary between memory and reality, between the lure of a dead world and the stubborn hope of a living one, inviting viewers to consider what it means to come home after the battles that haunt us.