The Incident

Two parallel fates collide in a looping, claustrophobic landscape where fate and memory tug at the same thread. A small-time criminal named Carlos comes home to a tense confrontation with his younger brother Oliver, only to be trapped by a rogue cop, Marco, who materializes with no warrant and tries to haul them away at gunpoint. Oliver explains that he confessed under duress, while Carlos demands the warrant Marco swears he doesn’t have. The brothers overpower Marco and sprint through the apartment complex stairwell, but the chase takes a strange turn: Marco shoots Carlos in the leg, seemingly surprised by his own action, and an distant explosion echoes as the stairs reveal themselves as endless, folding back on themselves. In the chaos, Marco rifles through his wallet, finds a miniature playing card he cannot identify, tears it to pieces, and ignores it as the chaos continues. Oliver tends Carlos’s wounds, but Carlos bleeds out the next day, urging Oliver to seize the present—a message that sticks despite the surrounding confusion.

As Oliver mourns, Marco’s confidence collapses when he notices a vending machine restock itself, exactly as it did 24 hours earlier. The moment hardens Oliver’s resolve to resist, yet the two men clash over the metaphysics of their predicament—whether they are bound by some deeper design or simply trapped in a terrible loop. Far away, Sandra, with her two children Daniel and Camila, prepares to visit her ex-husband, while her new husband Roberto wrestles with anxiety about the trip. Daniel packs a deck of miniature cards—the same kind Marco found—and the road trip begins. At a gas station, Roberto carelessly offers Camila fruit juice, triggering an allergic reaction that spirals into an asthma attack. A green bamboo fragment found in the car begs questions that go unanswered as Roberto disposes of it, and the group learns that the road keeps looping back on itself, repeatedly passing the same stations and turns. When Roberto destroys Camila’s inhaler in a moment of fated misfortune, panic sets in and Sandra must turn the car around, only to realize that every attempt to escape returns them to the same point on the endless road. With the inhaler missing, Camila dies, and Sandra, overwhelmed by dread, abandons her children as she drives away, trying and failing to wake herself from a nightmare. Daniel lifts Camila’s body and leads the two on a desperate walk in the opposite direction, and the two factions eventually converge again, surrendering to the sense that they are trapped in a perpetual cycle.

Decades pass, and thirty-five years slip by while both groups remain trapped in their respective, repetitive purgatories. Each day yields a fresh copy of their belongings, which accumulate into towering mounds as they try to live within the confines of the same events. Sandra and Roberto, now aging, pursue a coarse, animalistic life, while Daniel grows into independence with minimal contact with them. Oliver trains and keeps himself fit, eventually leading elderly Marco in rituals that honor Carlos’s skeleton. When Sandra dies, Roberto and Daniel hold a funeral in which Roberto experiences a rare moment of clarity: he realizes they are stuck in something not real, a different dimension fed by the emotional energy of their traumas. The elderly Marco reveals a similar truth to the younger Daniel: he is really Daniel, the ten-year-old boy from the infinite road incident, explaining how these alternate dimensions diverge from reality and form a time loop.

The revelation makes their fates feel inescapable, but it also offers a glimmer of choice. Roberto urges young Daniel to break the cycle by refusing to follow his presumed fate, while the elderly Marco/Daniel urges the younger Oliver to do the same. At first, Daniel and Oliver hesitate, but in the end they opt to continue along their paths. Daniel steps into a police car and becomes Marco, tasked with arresting Oliver and Carlos. Oliver exits the apartment complex and becomes Karl, the Russian bellhop who services two newlyweds, setting into motion an accidental death for the groom that traps him and the bride in a fresh, thirty-five-year dimension. The loop endures, a cycle born from tragedy, sustained by emotion, and capable of yielding both fleeting happiness and enduring sorrow across its many iterations.

Last Updated: October 09, 2025 at 16:03