Following a messy breakup, an MIT graduate and a PhD student at Indiana University separately talk about the problems in their former relationship in two spliced-together conversations, exploring conflicts surrounding language, intimacy, commitment, and intellectualism.

Four women bending together after a traumatic experience

A graduate student, on a trip in the Sonoran Desert, contemplates quitting her PhD program and moving on with life.

As a woman slips in and out of sleep, her dreams become windows to moments in her life.

A young man remembers his sexual trauma while idly watching the torturing of a kidnapped kid.

A man tries to determine the cost of a passionate but brief love affair, and his calculations lead him to a solemn but hopeful realization.

A woman considers her possible shortcomings when her boyfriend tells her that he doesn’t like some things about her. After a period of reflection, she acknowledges the futility of self-deprecation.

An old woman experiences several blackouts as she approaches death.

As they prepare to sell off their family’s house, two siblings reckon with the difficulty of their childhoods—and the tragedy of their third sibling.

After their band breaks up, a woman and her boyfriend take up an itinerant lifestyle in Idaho. As she wanders through the wilderness and the small farming town, a sense of the inevitable, of the unspeakable, begins to dawn on her: She contemplates murdering her own baby.