Logline

Two girls flee a brutal Ohio adolescence for a fresh start in Madrid — but the past isn't a place, and only one of them survives the reinvention.

Backstory

Revealed in fragments, never chronologically. Joanne "Jo" and Jade meet in high school in a dead-end Ohio county. What binds them is the thing they never say out loud: the county's chief officer abused them both, and nobody would have believed them. The night everything changes, they crash Jade's parents' car, drunk. Facing a DUI that would end their futures, they turn their wound into a weapon: they confront the officer with proof of what he did. The charge evaporates, and two county scholarships appear with their names on them. The incident is buried — by everyone, including them. That's the poison: their freedom was purchased with their silence.

Act One — Madrid

Freshman year. New city, new language, new selves. This is the teaser's imagery: Gran Vía at night, candy shops, fur coats, the crosswalk hug. Their friendship is charged, physical, more than friendship and never named — shared gummy strips, near-kisses, sleeping in the same bed "because the dorms are cold." Nothing ties them to Ohio. They promise each other: we invent ourselves from zero.

Act Two — Old Patterns

Reinvention without reckoning fails. Jade spirals first — clubs, strangers, pills, disappearing for days — mistaking oblivion for freedom. Jo, who copes by controlling everything, tries to reel her in. This is Jade's villain turn: she gets cruel, and she's cruelest where it's true. She accuses Jo of policing her like the county did, of refusing to let either of them enjoy the freshman year they paid so much for — "You're the last piece of Ohio I haven't gotten rid of." The unspoken love curdles into the fight neither will name for what it is. The night it explodes, they're at Madrid's infamous seven-story club. Jo leaves. Jade stays.

Act Three — The Morning

Jo is woken in her dorm by a boy from Jade's corridor: Jade is dead. Then the reveal, in fragments: Jade — who, for once, had taken nothing — was drugged by a stranger's drink. Disoriented on the club's top-floor balcony, she fell. An accident. The final cruelty: the one night she was innocent. Jo is left holding their whole history alone — the abuse, the blackmail, the fight, the almost-kiss — and the film closes on the teaser's line, now devastating: every night ends the same way; you decide which part you keep.

The candy motif carries the whole film: sweetness in Act One, the spiked drink in Act Three.

Story · Direction · Cinematography · Editing — Andrea Rinzivillo © 2023