The Living Book combines live action and animation to describe a couple’s bickering attempts to account for all of human culture, post-apocalypse, as their own memories fail them. Partly inspired by the Doukhobors’ (a 17th-century Christian sect in Poland) Living Book, Erin Cosgrove’s film also draws on such diverse source material as string-theory, science fiction, and religious history. Meditative and humorous, the film confronts its overtly broad theme within the frame of an ongoing argument between two lifetime intimates.

In 1925, a young academic visits the Guthrie Asylum in Oklahoma to explore the native tribal belief in the snake god, Yig. There she is confronted by a bizarre creature, the sole living survivor of the nightmarish Halloween of 1889. As she learns the tragic tale of Walker and Audrey Davis- early residents of the Oklahoma Territory- she too begins to fall under the spell of an unrelenting fear that time cannot diminish.