SYNOPSIS

On a dying alien world, an android indistinguishable from a young human woman is assembled, programmed, and loaded onto a solo spacecraft. Her mission: travel to Earth, locate a rare marsh fungus on the South Carolina coast that may hold the cure to a virus driving her creators to extinction, synthesize it against a live pathogen stored in a sealed containment vessel aboard the ship, and return home. The stakes for her makers are absolute — they are shown as small, frail silhouettes, some collapsing as the ship launches.

As the spacecraft enters Earth's orbit, it clips a telecommunications satellite. The collision tears the ship apart, scattering debris that streaks across the night sky like shooting stars. The android is thrown through the cabin. Below her, the containment vessel cracks, and a luminous mist — the alien virus — seeps out and drifts into the open air. The android crashes into the woods outside Charleston, South Carolina. She staggers from the wreckage with a severed arm and a hairline fracture in her skull chip. She has lost her memory. She does not know what she is, where she came from, or what she was sent to do.

On Folly Beach, Louella Bloms — a 24-year-old musician and drug dealer — lives a drifting, precarious life at a beachside motel, shooting heroin, selling pills and powder, and playing guitar in the salt air with her small circle: Márcio, a bartender with a gift for deadpan nonsense, and Duke Devil, a transgender woman who lives large on nothing. Louella has recently been cornered by two dirty detectives, Rizzo and Vásquez, who caught her dealing and offered her a choice: move their confiscated heroin through her channels or go to prison. She has no leverage and no one to call. She agrees.

The android wanders into Louella's orbit, clutching her severed arm, wearing a stolen prom dress, unable to recall her own name. Louella duct-tapes the arm back on and lets the android stay. The two become inseparable — an unlikely pair bonded by proximity, loneliness, and a mutual recognition that neither of them fits anywhere. The android speaks in a naive, instinct-driven register, asking whether the car is in pain when it won't start, whether consuming joy improves survival odds, and observing with disarming directness that Louella talks to machines because she is lonely.

Meanwhile, FBI Special Agent Elledge arrives at the crash site, where investigators recover the empty, cracked containment vessel — whatever it held is gone. Agent Pope, who ripped his hazmat suit on the wreckage, becomes the virus's first visible human casualty, collapsing in a horrific hemorrhage at a Waffle House while Louella and the android watch from their booth. The alien virus begins spreading through Charleston and beyond, manifesting as sudden hemorrhaging, neurological failure, and death. A state of emergency is declared. Hospitals overflow. The CDC scrambles. The governor issues reassurances no one believes.

Louella's criminal situation escalates. When she brings the android along to sell the heroin to a buyer named Gaspard, he attempts to sexually assault the android, who kills him in self-defense — her first act of violence and the beginning of a recurring pattern in which the android's protective instincts collide with the human world's tolerance for abuse. Rizzo and Vásquez show up at the motel, furious that Louella still has the product and now has a body count. They give her 48 hours and a new buyer's number.

That buyer is Yessiree Bob, a man who presents himself as clergy but who is, in fact, a serial killer and child predator keeping a teenage girl, Pansy Paul, chained in his dungeon. Louella and the android discover Pansy on Bob's security cameras, descend into the dungeon, free her, and fight their way out. Pansy herself shoots Bob dead with his own shotgun. In the aftermath, Louella recovers a VHS tape from Bob's safe — covertly filmed footage of Governor Swan in compromising situations with young women.

Louella, Márcio, and the android hatch a blackmail scheme: digitize the tape, deliver a thumb drive to the governor's mailbox, and demand $200,000 — enough to pay off the dirty cops and disappear. They plan to cut the heroin and sell it over time for even more. The governor, panicking, contacts Ma, the Chinese restaurant owner, who is secretly his partner in a trafficking operation. Ma dispatches two professional hitmen, Chao and Tao, to eliminate Louella.

Events converge violently. Chao and Tao arrive at Louella's motel room and gun down Detectives Rizzo and Vásquez, who happen to be there looking for Louella. Louella, Márcio, and the android return from a McDonald's run to find the motel swarming with police and narrowly avoid the scene. They regroup at Márcio's apartment, but the hitmen track them there. Chao shoots Márcio through the peephole, killing him instantly. The android fights off both assassins in a brutal close-quarters battle, and Louella fires a gun for the first time in her life. They flee in Márcio's station wagon with nothing but the heroin, the gun, and each other.

Through it all, the android has been discovering, piece by piece, that she is not human — cutting open her own skin to find wires and circuitry beneath, feeling emotions she was not built to feel, grappling with a pull toward the marsh she cannot explain. In a tender scene in the flatbed of the station wagon at a gas station, she tells Louella that when Louella is hurt, she feels it somewhere she can't find, like a room she didn't know was there. Louella tells her that's what caring about someone feels like. The android says it's terrible. Louella agrees.

Driving north through the night, past abandoned quarantine checkpoints and empty roads, the android is drawn toward the coast — toward water, trees, and something growing. At dawn, on a rural road flanked by live oaks and Spanish moss, they are stopped by Special Agent Elledge and a tactical team. Elledge wants the android — she is proof of extraterrestrial life and the key to understanding the crash, the virus, everything. Louella refuses to hand her over.

The android, understanding the calculus — armed agents in the trees, Louella carrying a visible revolver — chooses to surrender to protect Louella. As she walks toward the SUV, Louella calls out. A tactical agent spots the gun in Louella's waistband, and the situation erupts. The android moves with inhuman speed to disarm Louella, pulling the revolver away from her, but the agents open fire. The android absorbs the bullets, standing between Louella and the guns until the ceasefire comes.

She collapses. Louella holds her in the dirt road, the marsh stretching out beyond the bridge — the very marsh where the fungus that could save the android's creators grows, bioluminescent and alive beneath the roots of an ancient cypress, waiting to be found. The android repeats her earliest words back, now saturated with feeling: "I was not built to feel this. And I feel it anyway." Her light goes out.

Louella holds her. No one moves. The android's opening voiceover returns — the same words about fragility, rebellion, and searching for meaning in the chaos — but now they carry the weight of everything that has happened.

In the final image, the android's hand spasms. A faint motion. Not a reboot. Not a system flicker. Something unresolved, hanging in the air like a question.