A young queer girl is entered into an eerie beauty pageant, of unknown stakes, that ultimately turns against her.

In 1900, Sigmund Freud began treating a 17-year old girl he called "Dora." Her parents brought her to therapy after she accused a family friend of sexual assault. Freud's account of his sessions with Dora was the only major case history he published of a female patient. Intercutting his published text with a scripted version told from Dora's point of view, Hysterical Girl revisits this landmark case. Woven throughout are several decades of cinema, Congressional hearings, and media coverage. What emerges is a portrait of the grip that Freud’s theory of hysteria has had on popular culture over the past century and into the present day.

When William's girlfriend Cassandra is seemingly abducted by an extra-terrestrial force, he starts to succumb to a madness. Haunted by the night that she disappeared, and flooded with nightmares of her possessed by some celestial creature. William's mind begins to break, and he is visited by a being just wanting to go home.