MATRILINE
WRITER | FEATURE FILM (IN DEVELOPMENT)

White awaiting routine gallbladder surgery, a woman’s quiet hospital stay unravels into a nightmarish confrontation with her estranged mother’s ghost - forcing her to relive buried childhood trauma and fight to protect her daughter across dimensions of memory, technology, and the supernatural.

Alone in a sterile hospital room, Lana scrolls through photos and videos of her young family to ease her nerves before gallbladder surgery. When a text from her husband reveals her estranged mother has just died, her mind drifts to uneasy childhood memories. As she revisits old home videos, a FaceTime call with her daughter Kaycee turns chilling - her little girl mentions “Nana”, Lana’s mother, whom she has never met.

Post-surgery, things spiral. Her husband vanishes mid-call, Kaycee begins speaking to someone off-screen, and video glitches show impossible visions - her daughter seemingly transported to Nana’s house. As Lana tries desperately to coach her daughter through the screen, reality slips: hospital hallways twist into abandoned liminal mazes, time fractures, and her past bleeds into the present.

Desperate to escape and save her child, Lana confronts the source of her haunting: not just her mother’s ghost, but a legacy of bodily disrespect she endured as a child. In a final confrontation within a shifting space that blends hospital and childhood home, she protects her daughter the way she was never protected - by standing up to the ghost of her past.

Rooted in technology, generational trauma, and bodily autonomy, Matriline is a found-footage horror film that blurs memory and reality, fear and love, and asks what it truly means to break a cycle.