SYNOPSIS:

Nick, a grief-stricken drifter, inherits his murdered brother’s grimy, neon-lit slot machine café on Chicago’s South Side — a business he never wanted and can barely stomach. The stench of gunpowder still hangs in the air when he unlocks the door and steps into the nightmare: a purgatory of smoke, flickering lights, and the ghosts of his sordid past. At first, he goes through the motions, tending to the café’s chain-smoking regulars and sleeping in the back room. But the grief festers. Nights blur into days in a haze of cheap bourbon, cocaine, and paranoia. His memories — his failures, betrayals, regrets — begin to manifest in strange, hallucinatory ways, crawling out of the cigarette smoke and into his waking life. He becomes convinced that something unnatural is watching him. As his mind unravels, his violent temper alienates the few remaining customers. He smashes machines, rants at phantoms, and isolates himself completely. Whether it’s madness, guilt, or something darker preying on him, Nick comes to believe that his own life has always been cursed — a doomed soul inhabiting a body destined to end here, in this filthy shrine to desperation.