While driving through the New Mexico Desert during a rainy night, the college students Jim Halsey and his girlfriend Grace Andrews give a ride to the hitchhiker John Ryder. While in their car, the stranger proves to be a psychopath threatening the young couple with a knife, but Jim succeeds to throw him out of the car on the road. On the next morning, the young couple sees John in another car.
With his radio blaring Three Dog Night's "Never Been to Spain," a shirtless man lounges on the hood of his sporty car; he smokes a cigarette as he stretches and shows off his physique. A young woman calls to him from a love seat on the front porch of a large house across the street. She's barefoot, sucking on a watermelon lollipop. He goes over to her and the verbal fencing begins. It looks like it's headed for a kiss, but he's going steady with someone else and she may not be exactly what she seems. By the end, someone has to weigh conflicting information and make an important spring-day decision.
Zoetrope is a haunting and surreal film set in an apocalyptic, decaying world. Based on Franz Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony”, a man is imprisoned for an unnamed crime and tortured by a nameless sadistic bureaucrat. As the chilling nightmare unfolds, the prisoner peels away the layers of his own metaphysical existence, inching ever closer to his inescapable fate.
