When an intern arrives in a neglected town to investigate its polluted waters, he uncovers a supernatural presence to the community's environmental destruction.
Set in a coastal Tunisian town, this short film blends grounded environmental drama with supernatural horror. Its story begins with a seemingly ordinary investigation into water pollution, leading to the discovery of a disturbing connection between decades of municipal negligence and a presence that refuses to disappear.
Through abandoned archives, contaminated shorelines, and unsettling encounters, the film gradually transforms an environmental investigation into a confrontation with something far more sinister. The horror is rooted not in an unfamiliar world, but in recognizable places, familiar failures, and the consequences of problems left unresolved.
Designed as a low-budget production, the film relies on atmosphere, sound, practical effects, and restrained performances rather than spectacle. Its supernatural elements emerge from the physical reality of pollution, allowing the environment itself to become a source of dread.
Adem, a young environmental engineering intern, arrives in a neglected coastal town to study its water pollution. Guided by Sarah, a local environmental worker, he begins examining the shoreline, documenting waste, and investigating the origins of the contamination.
His investigation leads him to Chakib, the town's mayor, whose unsettling demeanor conceals a disturbing history. Inside the municipal archives, Adem discovers reports documenting the same environmental problems across several decades. Proposed solutions have repeatedly been rejected, bearing the same signature despite the years separating them.
As fishermen suffer and strange traces appear along the coast, Adem begins to suspect that the pollution is connected to something that has survived beneath the town's accumulated waste. What initially appears to be bureaucratic corruption gradually reveals a more disturbing reality, forcing Adem and Sarah to confront the relationship between the town's environmental destruction and the presence behind it.
Plastic waste, contaminated water, and neglected drainage systems form the physical and narrative foundation of the film. Pollution is presented not as a distant environmental issue, but as a visible part of everyday life whose consequences gradually become impossible to ignore.
Through Chakib and the municipal archives, the film examines how environmental destruction persists when those responsible repeatedly reject solutions, shift blame, and allow preventable problems to accumulate. The threat is sustained not only by individual actions, but also by institutional inaction.
The film treats forgetting as a force that allows environmental damage to continue. Communities move on, reports disappear into archives, and unresolved problems become part of the landscape. What is buried is not necessarily gone; it may simply be waiting to return.
Water is both an essential resource and a witness to the town's decline. The polluted sea, damaged drainage channels, and disappearing traces of clean water reflect the consequences of treating natural systems as places to discard waste rather than environments that sustain life.
The film's supernatural antagonist embodies the persistence of environmental damage. He does not represent an external threat disconnected from human behavior; his strength is tied to the waste, neglect, and unresolved problems that people continue to produce. The more the town ignores its destruction, the more powerful he becomes.
The visual language contrasts the apparent beauty of the Tunisian coastline with the waste and decay hidden within it. Sunlight, open landscapes, and familiar municipal spaces gradually give way to darkness, silence, and claustrophobic interiors.
Rather than relying on explicit violence or elaborate visual effects, the film builds tension through subtle physical details: black residue on sand, the rustling of plastic in otherwise silent rooms, a figure whose appearance seems unchanged by time, and archival photographs that should not be possible.
This restrained approach keeps the horror grounded and intimate. The supernatural is unsettling precisely because it emerges from ordinary places and recognizable environmental problems.
At its core, the film is about the consequences of refusing to confront environmental destruction. Its horror comes from the idea that pollution does not simply disappear when people stop looking at it. It accumulates, spreads, and leaves traces that outlive those who created them.
The supernatural becomes an extension of this reality: what society buries, neglects, and forgets can eventually return with a life of its own.