From her earliest memories, Sandra Larson is captivated by death, a fixation that grows into a disturbing personal ritual. The Body, Aurora Persischetti, becomes a constant presence in her world as she dances with the corpses of animals at night, rubbing them on her body and then staging a small funeral for them. This quiet, morbid hobby is shared with her only friend for a time, a girl named Carol, before their bond frays and eventually ends.
In college, Sandra channels that curiosity into biology, carefully dissecting the bodies of small animals with a careful, almost clinical detachment. She can’t resist being near the living dead, so she takes a job at a funeral home, drawn to the atmosphere and the idea that death holds some secret meaning. The funeral home’s janitor, Jan, shares Sandra’s belief in a presence beyond the visible world, suggesting that a body’s soul might linger somewhere after death. A moment in which Sandra drives the hearse containing a body through a car wash becomes a turning point: she spots a gleaming light inside the body and convinces herself that the soul lives on somewhere, a belief that only deepens her obsession.
As her interest deepens, Mr. Wallis takes Sandra under his wing and mentors her in embalming, guiding her through the practical craft of mortuary science. It’s there she meets Matt, a medical student who also has to study corpses for his degree. The two begin dating, and Matt is intrigued by the intensity of Sandra’s death fixation. They share late-night hours in Matt’s basement apartment, a tentative romance forming against the backdrop of Sandra’s nocturnal pilgrimages to the mortuary, where her rituals to “celebrate” the dead bodies of young men gradually push into dangerous, taboo territory.
Sandra’s nightly expeditions culminate in acts that blur the line between reverence and compulsion. The romantic relationship strains under the pressure of her double life, and Matt, alarmed by the widening gap between the living and the dead, confronts Sandra in uneasy, intimate exchanges that never quite reach a resolution. He tries to coax her to talk about what she’s feeling, but she withdraws, leaving him feeling both frustrated and frightened by how far her fixation has taken her.
The tension between living affection and an overwhelming pull toward the dead comes to a painful head as Matt’s attempts to connect with Sandra collide with her stubborn pull toward the realm of the departed. The struggle to choose between a life with the living and a life tethered to death spirals toward a tragic conclusion, leaving a lasting impression of heartbreak and consequence for everyone involved. >“The living and the dead don’t have to be enemies,” a moment of possibility flickers, but the moment passes and the consequences remain hard and final.
