Determinedly agnostic church organist Mary Henry (Candace Hilligoss) mysteriously survives a car crash and drowning, and goes to take a new job immediately. But she’s stalked by a pale specter, and slowly loses purchase first on her sanity, or then on the border between the living and the dead.
Entomologist Niki Junpei (Eiji Okada) goes to the dunes to capture beetles, misses his bus, and is captured himself by local villagers who trap him in a pit where he and a woman (Kyōko Kishida) dig sand for cement in exchange for basic necessities. Domesticity, capitalism, curiosity, and society itself are nightmares in which human beings are helplessly complicit.