Loglines & Synopses

75-year-old Michelle is a loving woman living alone in Dorset, deeply attached to her daughter Alice, son-in-law James, and grandchildren Lola and Tony. On the last Friday of every month she visits the grave of her husband Andy, whom she lost thirty-five years ago. Her grandchildren see her as the grandmother who never forgets — she never misses Lola’s birthday and always finds the perfect gift for everyone; the children jokingly call her a “superhero” with special powers. Within this warm, ritual-bound family life, small lapses quietly begin to appear: she forgets she has already tidied the garden, struggles to recognise her grandchildren when they stay with her for a weekend. The children find it amusing at first, while Alice dismisses it as a joke. The turning point comes on the anniversary of Andy’s death: Michelle forgets the significant day for the first time, and her hesitant steps and searching glances at the cemetery reveal she cannot even remember where the grave is. That same day Alice confides in James and faces the truth: her mother’s forgetfulness is a serious problem. With the support of a psychologist and a neurologist, the process begins to be managed; the children are gently told, and Michelle first moves in with the family. Lola covers the house with reminder labels and drawings, but as the process quickly grows heavier, the family decides to place her in one of the best care homes — Michelle accepts the decision with calm maturity. At the care home, Michelle grows close to a caring carer named Vanessa and is given her own small patch in the garden. Before long, a new resident arrives: David, 78, retired, a kind man who writes poetry. They meet in the garden, and a fragile but deep bond forms between them — since they often forget each other, they write each other’s names on their arms, and David gives Michelle the poems he writes (“You are my everything, just like my yesterday, just like my today, just like my tomorrow. I love you.”); over time their rooms fill with poems, photographs and notes. A light romantic subplot between Vanessa and fellow carer Jeffrey lends the story a touch of humour. David’s son Brian works at an advertising agency in London and sees his father regularly, unaware of this relationship. A few months later, Michelle passes away peacefully in her sleep. Devastated, David asks his son Brian to come as soon as possible, and the next morning, without explanation, takes him to the cemetery. There, among Alice’s family, Brian sees two drawings Lola has made and left at the grave: in one, half the table is the care home’s and half is Alice’s family dining table — half of Michelle’s face is sad, the other half happy; in the other, Michelle and David tending the flowers in the care home garden are shown in colour, while everything else is colourless. Shaken by these images, Brian hears the truth from David: nearly a year earlier, while he and Brian were on holiday in America, Michelle, with whom he had spent the thirty years since Brian’s mother died, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s; when the family couldn’t manage caring for her at home, she was placed in the care home. Realising he couldn’t breathe without her, David secretly arranged with the care home manager to cover all costs and moved in himself, presenting himself as an ordinary resident — something neither his closest friend Jeffrey at the care home nor his own son Brian had known until that moment. David speaks his final words: though Michelle forgot him anew every day, he never once forgot her — “Could you have forgotten?” Brian embraces his father in tears, overwhelmed by this quiet loyalty and sacrifice.

In 1980s London, in the laboratory of the View brand, Professor Lucas is running a secret experiment aimed at rejuvenating human cells. Lucas’s only real concern is restoring his 70% disabled daughter Bonnie — who lost her mother in a road accident and became unable to use a large part of her own body in the same crash — to her former health. The company’s owner, Mr James, and his assistant David, however, see the project purely in terms of profit. Under the strict criteria Lucas has set (aged 25–30, healthy, no bad habits), six donors are selected: Amelia (a chocolate-factory worker, secretly pregnant — a fact even Lucas won’t discover until months into the trial), George (a mathematical genius who gives private tuition), Alice (a withdrawn woman obsessed with checking mirrors), Emma (an insurance assistant who struggles with time and is always late), William (a bodybuilding fitness trainer), and John (a slow-moving man who loves the rain). During the six-month laboratory trial, without Lucas’s knowledge, James and David secretly inject the donors with extra supplements and drug them so they won’t remember the process. When Lucas discovers this, he too — secretly from James and David — injects a protective compound of his own devising, administered just beneath the donors’ hearts, since the veins in their arms are already overloaded by the standard treatment. This second scar, on their chests rather than their necks, becomes the physical marker of the future “good/bad” divide. When the trial ends, the donors return home, having formed a strong bond with one another. When Lucas leaves for a few months to spend time with his daughter, James launches a second experiment, kept entirely secret from him. David’s summary of the criteria is telling: “No adverts, no announcements... I’ll reach out to people I can bail out of prison, drug addicts, or homeless people... people whose deaths nobody would even hear about.” Six desperate people (Amanda, Tom, Lisa, Mark, Liam, Michelle) are shackled by the neck and subjected to extreme overdosing. This is the turning point that crystallises the film’s moral centre: the same science, driven by two different intentions, produces two very different outcomes. Ten years later, the “good” donors begin discovering extraordinary abilities in themselves: John moves at the speed of light, Emma stops time, Alice turns invisible, George reads minds, William flies, and Lola (Amelia’s daughter, affected because Amelia was pregnant during the trial) can communicate with animals. At the same time, the news reports a mysterious group — the “Lab Rats” — throwing Tower Bridge into chaos while cars are still crossing it, all bearing the same scar on their necks. Amelia spots the connection, the team reunites, and — finding the laboratory abandoned — reaches Lucas through his daughter Bonnie’s social media. Lucas comes to them and tells the truth — that James and David secretly gave the donors extra doses behind his back, that he secretly countered them with a protective compound injected beneath their hearts, and that the “good” donors’ powers are the product of these two different mixtures. Together they conclude that James and David must have run a second, “dark” experiment entirely behind his back. Meanwhile, the Lab Rats — having captured James and David to extract information — track down and kidnap Lucas, coercing him through force and threats to help them use their existing powers to the fullest. Lucas denies that the earlier donors have any abilities at all, protecting them the only way he still can. As the good team, which first trained under Lucas’s guidance, keeps developing its powers on its own, the Lab Rats send the London Eye careening out of control, terrorising the city. In the final scene the two teams face off at the London Eye: thanks to George’s mind-reading, the Lab Rats’ next move is predicted in advance, Emma stops time, and William and John work together to bring the wheel safely back into place. Realising they cannot sustain the fight, the Lab Rats flee the scene.

Adam is 36, handsome, disciplined, and a teacher everyone loves. Every morning he swims or takes a walk, and every evening he meets his group of friends — the lawyer Lucy, the dancer Debbie, the fitness instructor Tony, the unemployed and cocky Andy, the IT manager Chris, the sales representative Vanessa, and the barista Scot — at the local bar. In his classroom, he teaches his students the one question he places at the centre of life: “What if it were you?” — empathy, stepping into the other person’s shoes. Over drinks at the bar, the group realises that Scot still hasn’t proposed to Vanessa. Vanessa grows increasingly unsettled; even the wedding date is uncertain, because no formal proposal has ever taken place. Led by Adam, the group hatches a secret plan without telling Scot: at Debbie’s dance studio, a surprise proposal is arranged around a live performance by Adam’s neighbour — sixteen-year-old Tom, who uses a wheelchair, plays the drums, and is passionately devoted to music — together with a friend. Everyone has a task: Lucy and Chris handle the planning, Debbie keeps Vanessa occupied while she and Tony prepare the studio, and even Andy (irresponsible as ever, but still on board) takes charge of the masks. On the 29th of February the proposal goes off without a hitch; Vanessa says yes, and the group fixes the wedding date on a symbolic day — the 3rd of December — which, as Adam points out, is both the anniversary of the first human heart transplant and World Disability Day. The preparations continue lovingly for months: Adam arranges the school gymnasium, Tony and Debbie handle the decorations, Chris secures sponsorship, and Andy takes on bar service. But with the wedding just months away, Andy — wanting to meet up with an old girlfriend — draws Scot along with him; through a bet, he talks Scot into it, the two get drunk, and the night carries them back to Andy’s flat. That night, Scot ends up sleeping with Kate, a friend of Andy’s girlfriend — without even fully realising what he has done. The next day, unable to reach Scot, Vanessa panics; Adam and Chris learn the truth at Andy’s flat. The truth spreads through the group, and Lucy sets out to tell Vanessa. The wedding is off. This day — the 11th of October — will forever be remembered by the group as a “day of mourning.” They never see Vanessa again; she switches off her phone, goes off somewhere by the sea, and disappears without a trace. The friend group slowly falls apart as well; the table at the bar grows emptier every evening. Only Adam, refusing to give up hope, keeps going to the bar every night — but no one comes anymore. One evening, Adam comes home, goes into the study as he always does, and closes the door — and for the first time in the film, we see what lies on the other side of that door. The person who enters is Adam’s mother, Lisa. Adam is a young man with severe physical disabilities, unable to use his legs or hands; he has lived this way for eighteen years — a condition that began two years after the death of his father, Sam, an Olympic-medal-winning swimmer. Photographs of his father hang on the walls. The school, the bar, the friends, the love story — everything we have watched has been a world Adam built entirely alone, in his own mind, without sharing it with anyone. The material of this fantasy is real: every character is a real friend of his from the rehabilitation centre, and each of them has a real-life disability — Lucy is deaf and mute, Debbie has a severe physical disability, Tony uses a wheelchair, Chris is autistic, Vanessa has SMA, and Scot has a severe physical disability and ADHD — but in his fiction, Adam has transformed them into healthy, free, and able-bodied individuals. Only he performs this transformation, and only he knows about it; his friends have no idea this fantasy exists. Tom, in turn, is not a real child — he is a version of Adam’s own young, healthy self, written into the story as disabled yet able to play the guitar and drums. Mother and son paint the sea together — a boundless stretch of coastline — the same image Adam has returned to again and again throughout his fiction. The next day, they attend the “3rd of December World Disability-Free Living Event”; Adam is reunited with his real friends. Lisa meets Elizabeth, Vanessa’s mother — we learn that in reality, Vanessa passed away on the 11th of October. Elizabeth says her daughter always dreamed of living by the sea; Lisa gives her the beach painting she made with Adam as a gift. As they leave the centre, Adam encounters the real Andy — a healthy man who once bullied him, and whose name he gave, in his fiction, to the irresponsible character who betrays Scot. Angry but silent, Adam repeats his own catchphrase to himself: “What if it were you?”

Jacob (30) is a successful accounting auditor living in London with an advanced symmetry obsession — his café cake must have exactly five grapes, his fruit milk exactly three slices of banana and four of strawberry. He never drinks alcohol, smokes, or even drinks cola. His parents, Adam and Samantha, are alcoholics who shout at each other and live in a messy home; they barely notice his existence, which is why he moved out and started living alone years ago. Emily (28), who frequents the same café, has been a drug addict since she was eighteen — ten years now — and is a messy, reckless copywriter. Her religious but helpless parents, Frank and Bethany, know about their daughter’s addiction but cannot solve it; they never visit her at home. Amid the comic “bets” of the café’s chef Raymond and waiter Mark (whether Jacob will notice a shifted picture, whether he’ll count the grapes), Jacob and Emily meet and are drawn together by the pull of opposites. A bittersweet closeness grows between Jacob’s “everything in its place” flat and Emily’s home where “mess is its own order”; both try to obey the other’s rule (“don’t touch anything”) while, in truth, falling for each other. Emily proposes that Jacob move in with her — she believes they can live together in her home without disturbing his order; her secret hope is that living together will help her cut back on drugs. Shortly after moving in, Jacob catches Emily secretly using on the balcony and learns of her ten-year addiction. Emily suggests to Jacob that using drugs could free him from his obsessions. Jacob refuses at first, but the question keeps returning to him — could it really free him from his obsessions, and give him a happier life — and it won’t let go of him; he goes to his family seeking help but again goes unheard, unseen. In the end, Jacob tries the drug of his own free will. Contrary to expectation, it is not Emily who is “fixed” by Jacob — it is Jacob who is drawn into Emily’s addiction. He rapidly becomes dependent; he no longer cares about the number of grapes, eats the cake without question — at first a funny “death of the old Jacob” joke among the café staff, it gradually becomes a tragic transformation. Around the same time, Emily discovers she is pregnant but cannot tell Jacob because of his worsening state. One day, while Emily is visiting her parents, Jacob dies of an overdose. Adam and Samantha, believing their son “destroyed himself with drugs,” remain indifferent even now. Emily overhears them, goes to them, and tells them the truth: Jacob’s symmetry condition, the efforts they never noticed, and that they are going to be grandparents. This scene lets the family finally — even if too late — learn to “listen,” through a true reckoning. Emily goes to her own family and confesses everything — her addiction, Jacob, her pregnancy; this time the family does not reject her, but embraces her. Throughout her pregnancy, Emily overcomes her addiction and returns to a clean life. Twenty years later, we are at a book signing in the same café: Jacob and Emily’s son, Jess, has written a book on drug addiction titled “YOUR CHOICE, YOUR LIFE” and works for an organisation that helps addicts. Raymond and Mark are still there, serving guests slices of cake with exactly five grapes and glasses of fruit milk with exactly three slices of banana and four of strawberry. The film closes with the foreword of the book: “You too can be free of your addictions. The choice is yours. You could use, like my father, for a very short time and end up dead as a result, or, like my mother, you could use for years and then give it up during the most sensitive period of your life, pregnancy, and end up healthier than ever before.” Jess and Emily embrace.

Set between the 31st of October and the 25th of December, this story follows 68-year-old widowed mother Linda’s journey into Alzheimer’s disease, and her family’s struggle to face it. On Halloween, while carving pumpkins with her grandchildren Bonnie (12) and Raymond (9), Linda suddenly forgets their names; her daughter Amanda takes it for a joke, but is unsettled by the genuine confusion on her mother’s face. A few days later, Linda grows anxious, insisting her husband Alan — who died of a heart attack five years ago — should have been home hours ago; Amanda is forced to remind her that he has died, and the two hold each other and cry. Amanda tells her brother Jack (37, a chef, single), but Jack puts it down to ordinary forgetfulness brought on by old age and grief. Jack goes to check on his mother by cooking her favourite meal, Cottage Pie. While he’s preparing it in the kitchen, the doorbell rings — Linda has ordered the very same dish from a food delivery service, unaware Jack is cooking it, and happily welcomes the courier. Jack realises in that moment that this is far more serious than old age. Jack consults a doctor, who gives him detailed guidance on making daily life easier for an Alzheimer’s patient — non-slip plates, sticking to routine, never changing her surroundings, never hurting her feelings — and he passes it on to Amanda. Meanwhile Bonnie and Raymond, worried their grandmother might get lost, tape hand-drawn directions to the trees around the neighbourhood, and Raymond prepares reminder cards; Amanda fits out the house to suit Linda’s needs, adding non-slip crockery and labelled cupboards. The time the family devotes to Linda creates tension between Amanda and her husband Mark, but the children bring the family back together. Linda is taken to the clinic for a formal diagnosis. She fails the clock-drawing test; after an MRI and blood tests, the doctor confirms dementia caused by Alzheimer’s and explains that the condition is irreversible and progressive. The family decides not to tell Linda the diagnosis. As they leave the clinic, Linda mistakes the doctor for one of Jack’s childhood friends and recalls a summer’s day from years ago in flawless detail — the doctor explains that older memories are stored in a deeper, better-protected part of the brain. As the illness progresses, Linda’s good days and bad days follow one another; some days she recognises no one, other days she recalls her oldest memories with total clarity. Visiting Alan’s grave with Amanda, an old wristwatch resting on the headstone catches Linda’s eye, and she recounts, in full detail, the only argument she and Alan ever had in their marriage — before admitting she is the one who left the watch there herself. “Those who love each other find their way back to each other in the end,” she says. On Christmas Day the family gathers; with her mind clearer than usual that day, Linda recites the family’s Christmas prayer by heart, and at the children’s request recounts an unforgettable childhood Christmas of Amanda’s in vivid detail. As everyone sits astonished and happy, Linda goes to bed saying she is meeting Alan tomorrow at the café where they first met. The next morning, when Bonnie goes to wake her, they find that Linda has died peacefully in her sleep. In the midst of their grief, Raymond finds a notebook in the drawer of Linda’s desk. Inside, everyone’s favourite meals, birthdays and memories are recorded one by one. As they clear the house, they find similar notebooks tucked into every corner, each page headed “Don’t Forget” — Linda had been using them to hold on to her family’s names and important details before she forgot them. On a bookmarked page is a letter in Linda’s own hand, describing how hard writing these lines had been for her, and how she feared forgetting their names — ending with the words, “Can a person forget how to breathe? You are my breath. I love you.” The letter leaves the family with both profound grief and a quiet peace in knowing she suffers no longer.

London, 25 December 1990. On Christmas morning, a clergyman is found dead with his neck broken. Police officers George and Linda arrive at the scene; a few weeks apart, a prostitute is found stabbed to death and a drug addict is found strangled. No connection can be found between the murders — the methods, the victims, and the motives are all completely different. Detective Inspector Noah deepens the investigation together with George and Linda. A fourth victim is found with traces of a newly emerged, rare and extremely potent substance at the scene — a drug that first causes the user to lose consciousness, then plunges them into violent hallucinations and rage. This lead takes the team to an old dealer, then to the mysterious go-between Tony, and from him to the dealer Alex. Alex confesses that he sold this substance to a young man who “looked like he’d lost his mind,” only hours before one of the murders was committed. The suspect, caught through surveillance — an identity-less young man with no family, who calls himself Pablo — confesses to one of the murders and is sentenced to life imprisonment. As he’s led out of the courtroom, he turns to the cameras and says “DO YOU KNOW ME?”; no one can make sense of the remark. But the murders don’t stop. Desperate, the team brings Pablo, now craving a fix in his cell, in for questioning again, and Pablo sets a surprising condition: he will only help them if they play the Royal Game of Ur with him, a game he’s played since childhood — whoever wins gets what they want. Left with no choice, Linda and George agree and learn the game. Some time later, a new victim — this time an elegant, successful woman — is found strangled with her own underwear. The clues Pablo gives them (the rare brand of underwear used) lead them to a shop, and from there to the shop owner’s girlfriend, Claude. Claude, too, has no identity records; she breaks down during questioning and confesses — she killed the victim because her boyfriend had cheated on her with the woman. She, too, is sentenced to life, and on her way out of the courtroom says “WHO AM I?” Still the murders continue. The team now begins questioning both Pablo and Claude together through the game — every win brings a clue, every loss means dealing with a demand for alcohol or drugs. A new file arrives — a man in his seventies has been killed — and Claude notices that the victim used to own an old rest stop; she suggests this is a “revenge” killing, and predicts that the next target will be the rest stop’s former business partner or manager. The prediction proves correct — the killer is caught in the act, lying in wait. This man, too, has no identity; he calls himself Ted, says he’s American, and confesses to killing the elderly man who had “swindled” him — the same reason he gives for having lain in wait to kill the rest stop’s former manager, caught before he could finish the act. As he’s led off to prison he says “WHERE AM I?” Ted’s remark leads Noah to call him back in; only then, with some embarrassment, do Linda and George recall and tell Noah that Pablo had earlier said “Do you know me?” and Claude “Who am I?” — both dismissed at the time. Suspicious, Noah brings all three in for questioning at once; all of them claim not to know one another. During an insistently proposed joint game, Ted — irritated by the other two constantly demanding alcohol and drugs — asks to speak with the officers alone, and tells them the truth: the three of them are siblings — Adrian (Pablo), Olivia (Claude) and James (Ted). James tells the story from the beginning: their mother Amelia and father Richard were a happy couple at first; but when James was sixteen, his father learned of his mother’s infidelity, turned his back on religion, sank into alcohol and drugs, and began beating the family. In 1975, on a caravan holiday, while their mother was once again flirting with a man at a rest stop, their father started drinking and a huge fight broke out. James took ten-year-old Adrian, then Olivia, and sent them across the road to the park with their game, tampered with the car’s brakes, calmed his parents down and got them into the car — in what was made to look like a car accident, both parents died; James set the car on fire with the bodies inside, in front of his siblings. The family was presumed dead. So that their real identities could never be discovered, James burned all three of their fingertips with acid and cut Z-shaped marks into them. Growing up under false identities, never revealing their real names, Olivia turned to prostitution, Adrian to drugs, while James remained devout and withdrawn. The siblings drifted apart, and reunited again in the autumn of 1989. To save his siblings from addiction, James revives their childhood game: whoever wins won’t let the loser touch alcohol or drugs that day. But over time, this control mechanism turns into a means of inflicting pain and venting rage on one another — the loser is forced to kill a victim resembling themselves, chosen by the winner: Olivia is made to kill prostitutes or alcoholics, Adrian is made to kill addicts, and in turn they make James kill clergymen. As each one is caught, the murder interval for those still free grows shorter (from three weeks down to one week) — because James, even once the game has effectively ended, keeps the “order” going fairly. The woman Olivia killed, however, falls outside the game — she was the mistress of the man their mother first cheated on their father with; it’s a personal revenge. James’s final victim, and the man he attempted to kill next, are likewise the men their mother was unfaithful with at that same rest stop — the cycle returns to where it began. Once the truth is fully revealed, the three siblings are brought before the court again and sentenced to life imprisonment. As they leave the courtroom, all together, they turn to the audience and the cameras and ask: “So you know us now?”

Sixteen-year-old Tony, living in Dorset, has lately been coming home late and his relationship with his parents has broken down. His father Adam is a passionate but unsuccessful writer who never leaves his typewriter despite never earning any money from it; his mother Alice is a homemaker. Tony takes up smoking, falls out with his girlfriend Amanda, and falls in with an older crowd — Mark and Alan — who hang around the car park. Trying to “prove himself” to them, he starts taking drugs; one night he blacks out and is taken back to Mark and Alan’s house, where he discovers it is full of stolen goods — but there is no turning back now. To pay off his growing debt he gets drawn into their “business,” leaves home for good, and moves in with them. He and Amanda briefly reconcile at school, but soon after, when she sees him taking drugs in the woods, she is horrified and they split apart. Mark and Alan then rob the jewellery workshop where Andy works and assault him; Andy realises the attackers were Tony’s new friends and tells Lisa. A few days later, Amanda summons Tony to her house and tells him she is pregnant; Tony says he doesn’t want the baby and leaves her — their final meeting. Lisa and Andy try to confront Tony at the café, but Tony cuts them out of his life too. Without telling Tony’s family about her pregnancy, Amanda decides to move to Bristol to stay with her alcoholic aunt Lucy. Lucy takes her in, but once Amanda arrives, Lucy draws a bitter lesson from her own past: Amanda’s father, an addict just like Tony, used to beat her mother, steal, and sell her mother’s belongings before abandoning them both — her mother later died of cancer. Years pass. In Bristol, Amanda gives birth to their son Jo and builds a new life for herself. Tony, meanwhile, becomes fully addicted, spreading his drug operation from local streets to the whole of England, and carrying out robberies (including a petrol station hold-up) purely for the thrill. His family can no longer even reach him by phone. Mark and Alan eventually force him into a bank robbery; all three are caught. During questioning, the police tell Tony that his mother has died and that his father now lives in a care home, no longer of sound mind — Tony learns this for the first time in that moment. In court, Tony is sentenced to twenty years in prison, and Mark and Alan to thirty years each. Years into his sentence, his mental state completely broken, Tony suffers withdrawal crises. Every night he dreams of his mother, his father, Amanda, Lisa and Andy, and of the child he has never met, all of them asking him “why?” On one of the rare nights he manages to sleep, he dreams of his mother in the kitchen, Amanda in the living room playing with their son Jo, and his father, as always, writing at the typewriter. His father tells him the new story he is writing is about “experience”: our choices shape our lives, and experience is too expensive to buy; if we don’t listen to those who have already lived it — starting with our family — we will learn the same lesson the hard way, “if not today, then maybe one day.” When Tony asks what the story is called, his father answers: “Maybe One Day.” At that moment his mother’s voice calls out — and the twist is revealed: everything we have watched has been Tony’s own dream, or rather his own fiction. The “writer” we have seen from behind throughout the film is Tony himself, who has fallen asleep at his desk. In reality, Tony is a respected, successful writer, living with Amanda and their son Jo. As he comes down the stairs, he looks at the photographs on the wall — each one the exact opposite, happy counterpart to a breaking point from his dream: instead of a family fight, his parents’ wedding anniversary celebration; instead of learning of his mother’s death, the day the whole family shaved their heads together to celebrate her beating cancer… In the garden, as the barbecue is being prepared, Lisa and Andy — now a couple — arrive. Andy is curious about Tony’s new story; he goes upstairs with Tony and describes the photographs on the staircase step by step, and in the study Tony explains that the story is about “experience” — the life he might have lived had he ignored the experience of his family and friends. When Amanda calls them down, everyone gathers in the garden; Andy sets his camera to take the photo automatically, and as everyone poses, Tony shares the story’s name with them all: “Maybe One Day.” The shutter clicks at that exact moment, and the newly taken photograph takes its place in the empty frame at the very top of the staircase — the final shot of the film is that photograph, framed on the wall.