The Submarine Kid

Spencer Koll returns from a harrowing deployment and finds it hard to rejoin civilian life. The everyday rhythms feel unfamiliar and old routines no longer fit. The weight of his memories shadows every room and conversation in his home.

He attempts to reconnect with his circle of friends and his girlfriend Emily, but the memories keep pulling him away. Conversations feel strained and future plans falter under the weight of trauma. The fragile peace of ordinary life remains out of reach.

At a party, Spencer meets Alice, a woman who seems to offer him a sense of peace and a new kind of light amid the fog of memories. Her presence feels oddly soothing, even as it unsettles him. He can’t quite pin down what she represents, but he’s drawn to her

Alice hints at a story about the Submarine Kid, weaving memory, myth, and longing into a single, unsettling thread. The tale links past trauma to present unease and hints at something beyond ordinary life. Spencer starts to feel that reality is thinning around him.

Outside, a tense confrontation erupts as Spencer confronts the instigator, driven by a flashback he cannot control. The ensuing violence makes those around him fear for his grip on reality. The line between memory and action blurs dramatically.

The violence spills into a car ride with Alice, where her screams mix with his panic and the journey becomes a perilous trek toward Thunder Lake. The confined space heightens the tension between dream and waking life. He clings to the hope that this ride might lead to something safe.

The couple arrives at Thunder Lake and Spencer tries to regain his composure, even performing a driving maneuver along a road that skirts the water. The scene hints at a dangerous lure of the lake and the fragility of his control. Nervous energy pulses beneath the surface.

A charged connection forms as Spencer and Alice become close, and he declares that he never wants to leave her. The moment feels intimate, but it also deepens his reliance on the illusion of safety she provides. The border between love and delusion grows thinner.

Spencer tries the driving maneuver again, loses control, and crashes through a fence into Thunder Lake. The accident shatters the fragile moment of calm and reopens wounds he cannot escape. The lake becomes a mirror for his trauma.

Spencer wakes in a hospital and fears the unthinkable: that Alice may have died in the crash. Complicating matters, no one can confirm who Alice is or where she went, leaving him to wonder if she exists only in fear or his mind. The world feels uncertain and fractured.

He begins to realize that Alice is tied to his underwater moments, a ghostly presence that appears when he suffocates or when waking and dreaming blur. The line between memory and reality grows dangerously thin. The trauma now haunts his every breath and blink.

A chilling revelation arrives: Alice is revealed to be the ghost of the Submarine Kid’s girlfriend, linking Spencer’s current pain to a past tragedy. The haunting intensifies as memory and myth fuse with his reality. He begins to see the wound in the war as something living and haunting.

After his discharge, a sharper flashback erupts to the foreign country where his squad operated. Radios fail, orders blur, and chaos erupts as he believes he’s ordered to shoot militants but is told not to. He shoots a woman used as a human shield, an act that seals his trauma in memory.

The next morning, his friends find him at Thunder Lake, still attempting to drown himself as if the lake could swallow the past. Alice reappears in a wedding dress beneath a boardwalk, waiting for the Submarine Kid; Spencer admits he wants to stay with her, but the wedding cannot be for him and reality intrudes. He confronts the impossibility of their union and the weight of memory.

In a final, cinematic sequence, Spencer drifts underwater and encounters the Submarine Kid’s skeletal remains, then resurfaces in his combat uniform with the Submarine Kid’s goggles in hand. He returns to the land with the relic, and, in the closing gesture, leaves the goggles on Thunder Lake’s shore so Alice’s ghost can move on with the Submarine Kid. Healing comes from acknowledging the past rather than drowning in it.