SYNOPSIS
Jessica, a young Asian/American New York photographer has always felt detached; private schools and culturally whitewashed world of her parents has left Jessica without a real sense of who she is. Struggling to define her own identity, Jessica has immersed herself in her art. But her photographs are “detached, impersonal and uninspired”; labels that have come to define Jessica and her relationships.
But everything changes when her new boyfriend Morgan encourages Jessica to “open up”, to explore her culture through her photography. When Morgan gifts her an antique German camera, Jessica is inspired by the ethereal, ghostlike quality of the camera’s ground glass. Seduced by the inverted images she sees in the viewfinder, Jessica begins explores more personal and erotic themes. But Jessica’s newfound self-expression strains her relationship with Morgan. She begins to loose her sense of reality, capturing increasingly dark images seem to be connected to the camera’s disturbing past.
Morgan receives a cryptic letter stating he may be the sole heir to a massive fortune. When he is summoned to Louisiana to determine his lineage, he gives Jessica an ultimatum. Once again Jessica reluctantly sets aside her photography and quickly slips back into her familiar routine.
Arriving at the mysterious Kertzman Estate hidden deep in the swamps of Louisiana, the couple learns Morgan may not be the only heir when they meet Alex and Gina; Morgan’s estranged half-sisters, and their spouses. Familiar routines turns to neglect as Jessica and the other spouses begin to be treated almost as outsiders by the newfound siblings.
Encouraged by Dieter, the estate’s strangely attentive caretaker, and his mute wife Ilsa, the group seems to fall under the influence of the house itself and the archaic repressive societal patterns it represents. Plied with Ilsa’s narcotic-like tea, the instant, close bond between the potential heirs magnifies, triggering latent insecurities and jealousies in their spouses. Not realizing Ilsa’s tea is a powerful hallucinogen designed to remove their inhibitions, the group becomes immersed in a Masquerade of spirits and begin to act out their darkest impulses in ghostly encounters. As the line between fantasy and reality becomes blurred, Morgan gives in to his half-sisters dark yearnings.
Feeling isolated and outcast, Jessica is seduced by Gweilo, the ghostly entity of a young Japanese woman connected to the estate’s dark past. In a series of waking dreams Gweilo reveals the house’s disturbing connection to a secret postwar organization and patriarch, Jacob Kertzman’s Nazi past. When Morgan is subjected to a series of genetic purity tests, Jessica begins to realize he is unknowingly the key to a plan to resurrect the racially biased Nazi Lebensborn breeding program.
The others lost in a half-light of reality and fantasy, Jessica has to pull herself from the influences of misogyny and racism mired in complacency to break the patterns of a past destined to repeat.