In the dim glow of a single room he hasn’t left in years, Dolly, a 29-year-old failed singer, survives on shady remote vocal gigs — recording affirmations for crypto apps and meditation startups that own his voice forever. He stands rigid in the center of the floor, eating cold cans, answering endless rejections, waiting for the break that will finally justify the stillness.
Intercut with real deep-sea footage of the tripod fish — a creature that plants itself on bony stilts in total darkness, slowly losing its eyesight as it waits decades for food to drift by — Dolly’s life mirrors the abyss. As false opportunities flood his inbox, he becomes blinded to everything else: the world outside, the piling contracts under his door, and most painfully, his mother’s increasingly desperate calls and texts from a hospital bed hundreds of miles away.
We glimpse her decline in brief, wordless inserts — thinner frame, oxygen tube, shaking hand clutching the phone, coughing blood into tissue — while Dolly swipes away every notification, convinced tomorrow will be the day he “makes it” and can finally call her back.
When a legitimate record label offer finally arrives — the dream he promised her as a teenager — Dolly’s face lights for the first time in years. He reaches for the phone to share the news.
A neighbor answers. Screaming. Sobbing.
Mom died two days ago. Alone. Still waiting for his call.
In crushing silence, Dolly lowers himself to the floor. His invisible stilts snap. He lies flat on his back in the center of the room — arms at his sides, mouth open — and weeps like a child.
Intercut one last time with the real tripod fish: blind, stilts buckling, collapsing forever into the silt.
No more waiting.
TRIPOD FISH* is a quiet, visually hypnotic portrait of chosen isolation and irreversible regret. Shot almost entirely in one cramped location with minimal cast, it uses licensed deep-sea footage and precise sound design to create an A24-style emotional gut-punch on a micro-budget. A universal cautionary tale about the calls we ignore, the messages we delete, and the people we lose while staring into our own abyss.
Written and ready for production.
A festival standout that will leave audiences in stunned silence.
Agasi Idhaya
20-year-old writer from Madurai, India
First short screenplay