Etzu Shaw, Writer 

Sloan Grant(s) Received: 2023, Columbia University, Screenwriting Award / 2023, SFFILM, Science in Cinema Fellowship

Project Type: Feature 

Genre: Drama

Length: 96 pages 

Field of Science: Biology

Stage: Development 

Synopsis: 

Cam (30), is an entomology PhD student with an obsessive relationship with insects. In addition to her own studies, collecting and preserving insect taxidermy is a comfort fixation for her, particularly as she seeks to escape the burden of living up to her mother’s scientific legacy. Cam’s antagonism towards her mother and general emotional repression is not well understood by others, particularly the more emotive BECCA (30), her rival lab-mate and casual sexual partner who ultimately guilt-trips Cam into joining a trip home with her brother ETHAN (34) for their mother’s birthday.

But when Cam reluctantly arrives to her mother’s rural home, she finds, to her horror, her mother’s decomposing body in her bedroom, crawling with insects, and blacks out from the shock. Though cause of death is determined to be sustained injuries from an accidental fall, the local authorities are quick to suggest Cam and Ethan’s prolonged absence and neglect of their dementia-addled mother was the true culprit. Grief is quickly substituted for bitter finger-pointing as the two siblings seek to shirk responsibility and provide excuses for their individual absences on agreed upon dates. When Ethan finds evidence of their estranged father ROBERT (65) having visited the house recently, he becomes convinced of Robert’s involvement, angering Cam, who was always closer to her father, and further sowing family division and disagreement over the interpretation of childhood events.

Meanwhile, when Cam returns to the university, she discovers in the trunk of her car, the insects from her mother’s body methodically preserved, collected in her blacked-out state as a kind of bizarre trauma response. Though initially disgusted, the ongoing drama with Ethan, Robert, and her own growing guilt drives Cam to enlist Becca’s help to study the insects to determine her mother’s exact time of death and whose absence or presence, ultimately, was responsible.

But the process of investigation with Becca, who unabashedly decides to help seeking a more serious romantic connection with Cam, begins instead to unravel Cam’s complicated feelings towards her mother’s temperamental and often hateful attitudes towards her. And Cam’s own penchant for pushing people away or assuming the worst of others becomes all the more clear as Cam and Becca are pit against each other at the university.
Ultimately the scientific investigation coupled with a dramatic final confrontation with Ethan reveals the shocking truth, that Cam was present at the time of her mother’s death and inadvertently caused her mother to fall after misinterpreting a gesture of kindness as one of aggression, subsequently blacking out and forgetting the events in shock. Realizing that her mother had in fact been trying to catch an insect for her, a rattled Cam rushes home to search for it, only to find it in Becca’s possession, who had previously taken it from Cam’s coat pocket out of curiosity. The entire ordeal forces Cam to re-evaluate her relationship to insects as a form of emotional escape from hard truths, and she burns her collection as Becca watches.