Press & publicity materials

A teenage girl, unseen by her parents in the moment she most needs them, comes apart on a remote Northern Territory road — and finds herself alone and unregulated in the bush, and needing to find a way back.

Willow is fifteen. She is travelling through the Northern Territory with her parents on a caravan trip framed as a family adventure and lived as something quieter and more fragile. Her parents are not failing her — they are each drowning in their own private exhaustions. Willow has learned to manage by staying small, by performing calm, by keeping her music in her ears. The performance is effortful. It works, until it doesn't.

A roadside breakdown brings the trip's pressures to the surface. Her parents slip into an argument that is about logistics on the surface and a marriage underneath. Willow's music begins to distort. She tries to interrupt, gently, and is shut down — not cruelly, but absently, by two people who have nothing to give in that moment. She waits to be re-noticed. No one turns. She steps backward off the shoulder. The image goes dark.

Willow disappears into the bush. She runs without direction, screams into a gorge at sunset, and becomes aware of a presence at the edge of her vision — a figure she cannot quite look at, that arrives only when she is conscious enough to know what she has lost. Drawn by the sound of water, she reaches a river at night.

In the cold and the dark, Willow stops fighting. The river is consistent in a way nothing else has been, and slowly the compressed mass of sound around her begins to come apart. Her hand opens — the same practised gesture as the car, chosen this time. Her phone is ringing in her pocket. She takes it out. The screen fills with missed calls and the ringing stops in her hand. She does not call back. Not yet. She steps out of the water and walks back toward whatever comes next, holding the first small piece of herself she has put back together. She knows the rest of the work is still ahead.