WONDERLAND

Genre: Prestige Sci-Fi / Drama
Tone: Eerie, grounded, emotional
Comparables: Arrival, Another Earth, Coherence, Flatliners

Length: 116 pages

LOGLINE

A chronically ill scientist undergoes an experimental treatment that relieves his pain by severing him from time itself—giving him the power to slip into the past and forcing him to choose between escaping suffering or accepting the consequences of altering reality.

THE STORY

Russell is a brilliant scientist whose body has betrayed him. Crippled by chronic illness and trapped in a life defined by pain, he survives rather than lives. When an unorthodox medical researcher offers him an experimental procedure designed to confuse the brain by mimicking the early stages of death, Russell takes the risk.

The treatment works—but not as expected. Russell’s pain vanishes, and his consciousness detaches from linear time. He discovers a vast, luminous “river” of time, marked by breaks—points where he can enter the past. During one journey, Russell emerges in rural Massachusetts in 1918, where a mysterious tear in reality has already begun to affect the land—and the people who live there.

As Russell’s journeys increase, the experiment attracts the attention of powerful interests eager to exploit its potential. What began as a medical breakthrough becomes an ethical minefield. Each leap risks altering the future, erasing lives, and fracturing causality itself.

Caught between a future filled with pain and a past free from it, Russell must decide whether escaping suffering is worth abandoning responsibility—and whether meaning comes from rewriting time or enduring it.

THEMES​

• The ethics of scientific discovery

• Grief as motivation

• “Can” vs. “should”

WHY IT STANDS OUT

• A fresh take on time travel rooted in near-death experience theory

• Emotion-first science fiction—character over spectacle

• Visually striking but contained and production-conscious

• Designed for the prestige/festival sci-fi space, not blockbuster excess

THE EXPERIENCE

Beautiful, unsettling, and intimate—WONDERLAND feels like a discovery that should never have been made, and a question no one should be forced to answer.