Parity Pipeline

Genre

Synopsis

RETREAT opens with a trauma. IZZY BOWERS, our hero, meeting her girlfriends for a

night out, turns a corner and finds herself in an empty, industrialized part of a cool city.

Alone on foot, her phone dies just as a menacing man chases her through the dark, ready

to attack, until Izzy follows the specter of a mysterious woman, and her pursuer,

following, is hit and killed by a car. Months later, Izzy is back to her old life of

overcrowded coffee shops, Craigslist roommates and dreaming of an escape, a fixer-

upper in the country. The dream seems remote, until an envelope shows up at door

announcing that she’s won a HOUSE of her own in an essay contest! She tells her best

friends, BEL, CARRIE and LEXI about her new life plan at their Book Club, where

they’ve joined to discuss Charlotte Perkins’ The Yellow Wallpaper, a classic story about a

woman who goes insane after being locked in a room by her husband. Anxious but

supportive, Izzy’s accomplished friends understand her need for a new chapter and say

they’ll come to visit as soon as they can. Izzy gets on a bus and is picked up in her new

city by MARIEL and WHIT DANIELS, a mild-mannered older couple. Mariel is the

original owner of Izzy’s prize house, and makes her feel welcome. Whit drops Izzy off at

the REHN HOUSE, where she is immediately out of her element. The electricity is

spotty, there are raccoons in the chimney and she has no internet, company, or food. As

Izzy is wondering if there’s something strange about this beautiful, empty house,

SCOTT, her mysterious neighbor from an adjacent property arrives to help smooth her

transition, and gifts her a pair of chickens. It seems all is well, until a ghost appears,

following Izzy. Izzy becomes accustomed to the house, if not entirely comfortable. The

backyard contains a pond that is dark and ominous, the fields nearby contain a small

graveyard, the house is empty, and the roads are overwhelming in their nature and

solitude. Her one solace are the postcards she writes to her friends, urging them to visit

and send her goods, which she dutifully mails in the mailbox at the end of the driveway.

One particularly unnerving day, Izzy goes to Whit and Mariel’s house for encouragement

and to call her friends. She encounters their abused dog, DUKE, and Mariel’s behavior

changes, keeping Izzy at a distance. Izzy is unable to call her friends, as a millennial whocan’t remember any phone numbers not programmed in her phone, and returns home. She

ventures to the second floor of her home and finds a guitar. She also discovers that the

view from one of the bedrooms is the same view in a painting at the Daniels’ house.

Before she can explore that coincidence further, she cuts her hand, and has to hurry to her

closest neighbor, Scott, for assistance. He mends her hand, is interesting and friendly, and

shows her a series of motion activated cameras he’s set up to follow a local deer. The

next day, Izzy returns to her house to find that her friends have ARRIVED! They laugh,

and she shows them around, explaining the mysterious happenings at the house. They

discuss Izzy’s strange detachment from civilization with humor and some concern, which

becomes greater concern when Izzy drags Bel and Lexi with her to steal the Daniels’

abused dog. In the process of dog theft aided by hotdogs, Izzy breaks into the locked shed

on their property and discovers a fleet of WOMEN GHOSTS, and their left-behind

trinkets, clothes, and postcards, including hers, which the Daniels have been stealing

from her mailbox. Izzy returns to the house. She looks to her friends for help, but they

begin to disappear, either retreating from view or meeting terrifying ends themselves.

Izzy realizes she is not the first young woman to whom this house has appealed to a

dangerous sense of adventure and need for ownership, Whit and Daniel arrive looking to

make Izzy the next victim. Izzy jumps in their car and drives away, looking for Scott to

help her, assuming her friends have been killed. She finds Scott, but he corners her and

confesses that he has been a part of this all along. Whit mistakes Scott for Izzy and kills

Scott. Izzy, injured but alive, escapes back to the house, to blue and red lights flashing.

The police have arrived, called by her friends BEL, CARRIE and LEXI, who were never

really there and have only JUST arrived themselves. Months later, with the Daniels’ gone

and the spirits calmed, Izzy relaxes at her home, with her visiting friends by her side, and

watch the driveway as the sister of one of the house’s victims arrives to find peace.