Mabel is a young ingenue working on a European horror film shot in an abandoned hospital. She strikes up a tentative friendship with her co-star Rosenthal, a gentle-natured young man with a severe facial deformity, as the characters in the lurid B-film they’re working on pursue a romance.

Challenging and satirizing norms of beauty and representation in cinema, Aaron Schimberg’s second feature is brazenly unclassifiable. Shifting between the bizarre, comedic, and even melodramatic, the film remains surprising and tender through wonderful performances by Jess Weixler and Adam Pearson.