Alice, 32, a writer recovering from a psychological breakdown retreats to a remote Victorian house to convalesce and focus on completing her screenplay in time for a fast approaching deadline. Shortly after her arrival, mysterious noises and strange happenings cause her imagination to run wild, sending her on a twisting and terrifying pursuit to find out what is behind the endless mind games. Frightened but intrigued, Alice gathers the courage to go down into the cold, dingy basement where she finds a shoe box filled with mini-dv tapes.Alice starts to watch the tapes and is soon drawn into the unfolding drama like a avid soap opera. The images on the tapes are of an older husband, David, lovingly but obsessively filming his new, young, beautiful wife, Lucy. At first Alice is amused by their affection towards one another. But as she continues to watch the series of tapes, she starts to notice David’s compulsive desire to always secretly film his wife during her most intimate moments.
Later in the evening while watching another tape, Alice is frustrated and angered when the tape comes to an abrupt end - just as David becomes aggressive towards his wife, physically attacking her to prevent her from leaving him. As she reaches for the last tape in the shoe box, eager to find out the next part of the story, she is disappointed to find that the mini-dv case is empty. Now desperately driven by the need to know what happened to Lucy, Alice returns to the basement and finds a mini-dv camera that had fallen inside a cardboard box and become hidden with the passage of time.
The terrifying secret that lies within the final tape will unravel Alice’s dark past.
Directed by Sean McConville. Starring Brittany Murphy, Thora Birch and Marc Blucas.
