On a dark and stormy night, Liu Ling (Tao Hui) finds three corpses suspected of being murdered in a hut. She becomes terrified and wants to escape, but a black phantom slowly climbed up behind her, never to be seen again. Many years later, Liu Tian (Wang Cheng) brings friends Fang Wenqing (Wu Qijiang) and Ye Zi (Zhao Shijin) and others came to the ghost village again to find the whereabouts of his sister Liu Ling. There is an unnamed monument at the entrance of the village. At nightfall, a series of horrible things happened. The next day, everyone saw Liu Tian in front of the stele. It turned out that he suspected whether his sister was buried under the stele. Liu Tian came to the haunted house where his sister had an accident and found her sister's skeleton. That night Liu Tian kept having nightmares and his spirit collapsed. From then on, every night in the dead of night, a ghost with only a head, a face, and no body would appear next to their pillows. Can they still leave here?

Inspired by Haining shadow puppetry, one of China’s first designated Intangible Cultural Heritage arts, the film follows Da Jiang, a humble performer in the Kunqu opera troupe "Wufeng Ban," secretly in love with his fellow performer Tianyin, who is betrothed to their senior, Changhong. Gifted with a sensitivity to light and shadow, Da Jiang discovers an old box containing shadow puppets and a script of The Tale of Hibiscus, which ignites his artistic passion. When Changhong loses his voice before a major farewell performance, Da Jiang steps in, winning Tianyin's gratitude. But rumors spread after she is seen attending his shadow puppet show, and Da Jiang leaves in silence to avoid conflict. Tianyin and Changhong go to Shanghai, while Da Jiang retreats to Yanguan Town, living aboard an abandoned boat and vowing to revive the once-glorious art of Haining shadow puppetry. There, he founds his own troupe: “Jianghai Ban.”