Come Back to Me

Dale’s early years are shadowed by a brutal, double tragedy: as a teenager he watches his mother, Eileen, fall victim to what appears to be his meth-addicted father’s violence. The scene ends when the police arrive and shoot the father, but the moment is seared into Dale’s memory. The officer who discovers Eileen runs from the house in shock, while Dale re-enters to tell his mother that everything will be all right, a quiet, stubborn hope clinging to him even as the chaos around him intensifies.

Years later in Las Vegas, Dale’s life intersects with a new kind of ordinary—neighbors who bring over cookies and try to be friendly. Across the street live Sarah and Josh, a married couple where Josh works as a croupier and Sarah is a graduate student researching the effects of pornography for her dissertation. When Dale is questioned by Sarah about why she seems to haunt his gaze, he bluntly admits that she reminds him of someone—someone he has lost touch with, someone who resonates with the memory of his mother.

As Josh holds down extra shifts at work, Sarah is suddenly fractured by a series of unsettling events. She experiences a highly vivid, almost cinematic dream in which she is murdered. The dream is so tangible that, upon waking, she discovers a different outfit on her body and a room that has been cleaned for her. A blood-stained shirt appears in the laundry, confirming how real the dream feels to her. Her friend Leslie, a pregnant doctor, becomes a touchstone of rational explanation, diagnosing night terrors and prescribing a hypnotic to ease the fear. Yet one clue persists: a striking scar she once wore has disappeared, a change that even Leslie cannot explain away.

Seeking relief, Josh calls in a favor and arranges a luxurious vacation for the couple. In the hotel’s opulence, Sarah finally sleeps without the night terrors that had plagued her. But once they return home, the terror returns with a vengeance, now accompanied by new symptoms, including nausea. Dale notices that Sarah looks unwell and presses her for answers about where she has been. When he leaves for work, Sarah sneaks into his house and uncovers a disturbing collection: photographs of people in states that resemble death, including herself. She also finds a hidden key replica—evidence that Dale had been delivering groceries to her home. Dale returns and, in a shocking moment, seems to kill her with a blow to the head. Yet Sarah awakens in her own bed, breathless, suspecting that what she experienced was another night terror rather than a real threat.

At Leslie’s house, a pregnancy test reveals the truth that had been eluding Sarah: she is pregnant. Leslie promises to schedule more tests to monitor the pregnancy, the night terrors, and the blackouts that have plagued Sarah. Unknown to her, Josh is sterile, a revelation that spirals into a painful insecurity when he learns of the pregnancy and abruptly leaves.

Left to face everything alone, Sarah installs hidden cameras around her home to capture the phenomena she has endured, hoping to understand the night terrors once and for all. The footage lays bare a chilling cycle: Dale enters the house, rapes and murders her, and then resurrects her, erasing portions of her memory in the process. The more she watches, the deeper she dives into a web of fear and memory, realizing that Dale has a long history of abducting and reviving neighbors. A disturbing conversation with Eileen, who has herself been institutionalized, reveals that Dale’s pattern is not random but a dark, repetitive compulsion. Eileen admits she placed herself in an institution to escape him, only to be resurrected by Dale after she committed suicide, and she pleads with Sarah to kill Dale, a request she could never fulfill herself.

As Leslie gives birth, the newborn’s appearance unsettles everyone who sees the child, not resembling either possible father, and the looming memory of Sarah’s video confrontation with Dale hints at a deeper truth. Meanwhile, Josh returns, encouraged by a friend to give Sarah another chance. But fear and mistrust drive Sarah to shoot at him when she mistakes him for Dale, a desperate act born of paranoia and pain. In a fragile, twisted moment, she begs Dale to resurrect Josh, hoping to undo the harm she has caused; Dale, unmoved, refuses. Desperate, Sarah attempts to coerce Dale by seducing him, hoping to manipulate the resurrection to save Josh. He revives Josh, who then helps pull Sarah back from the edge of ruin. Yet the violence catches up with them all: Sarah shoots Dale dead, ending his cycle of murder and resurrection.

In a final, tragic Chinese fire drill of consequences, the victims who had been murdered and resurrected—Dale’s former victims, including Sarah, Josh, and Leslie—collapse from their wounds all at once, as if the cycle has exhausted itself. The film closes on a quiet, haunting image: a close-up of Leslie’s child, the quiet continuation of life that lingers after so much violence and fear have burned away the old patterns.

The story moves with a methodical, unsettling tempo, tracing how past traumas echo into the lives of new neighbors, how fear can blur the lines between nightmare and waking life, and how the willingness to believe in a second chance can still lead to devastating endings. Through Dale’s relentless, uncanny pattern and Sarah’s determined search for truth, the film explores the fragile boundary between memory and reality, and the price of confronting a danger that cannot be easily killed or forgotten.

Last Updated: October 04, 2025 at 01:16