Isabelle: the synopsis

ISABELLE

 Larissa and Matt Kane are the perfect young couple, moving into the perfect home, in the perfect neighborhood in upstate New York. Larissa is pregnant. It’s a boy. His name is going to be Colton. Unexpectedly, Larissa goes into labor early. There are complications. It’s touch and go. She flat-lines. The doctors work feverishly at trying to revive her. She spends a full minute without any signs of life but then she comes back.

The baby is stillborn.

The haunting image of her baby in the morgue catapults her onto an emotional roller coaster, one that threatens her sanity, her marriage, and her life. Back home from the hospital, Larissa begins to “see” her dead baby. And then sees a young woman from the house next door, sitting at an upstairs window, staring at her, at the strangest times, making Larissa feel most uncomfortable. When she tries to point out this young woman to Matt, he doesn’t see anyone. Is Larissa losing her mind? Or is she being haunted by a spirit? Matt thinks it’s the former.

And, yet, as the story unfolds, it becomes clear that it’s the latter. It’s the spirit of Isabelle: a young woman born with spina bifida, she spent her life mute and paralyzed, in a wheelchair, enduring years of a horrific Satanic abuse at the hands of her father who claimed he “gave her to Satan”.

On her 24th birthday, the day before Larissa and Matt moved into their home, her guilt-ridden mother put a plastic bag over Isabelle’s head and did what she saw as act of mercy, putting her daughter out of her misery.

But what she had inadvertently unleashed was a raging spirit, one who wants nothing less than to take over Larissa’s life and make it her own. Isabelle can do this because Larissa, who had been dead for a full minute in the hospital, has passed through the portal between life and death, and is now vulnerable – and, since losing her baby, Larissa has lost her will to live. This is a story of possession that, at first, is believed by Matt and others to be a tale of Larissa losing her mind, but in the end Matt confronts the horrifying truth. When this raging ghost finally succeeds in possessing his wife, Matt must summon every ounce of strength and do what feels like the impossible – to bring Larissa back to the brink of death, to pass through the portal again, so that he can save her from this spirit that has possessed her.

At the end, we are left to wonder if any of this story actually took place, or if it’s been all just an ominous prophecy of what is to come for Larissa and Matt.