When a young actress on the verge of abandoning Los Angeles encounters a mysterious man who is an AI-transformed version of herself, she is drawn into a dangerous romance that forces her to confront every identity—and every desire—she has tried to escape.

Margot is house-sitting in a legendary Laurel Canyon home while deciding whether to give up her dream of becoming an actress. Over several increasingly dreamlike days, she encounters a series of strangers: a child, a runaway, a businessman, an elderly woman and an imposing legendary film director. They appear to belong to entirely different lives, yet each carries the same unmistakable eyes.

Margot begins to suspect that these figures are alternate versions of herself. Her obsession deepens when she meets Eren, the Director’s young assistant—a male incarnation of Margot and the film’s contemporary Eros. Their attraction is immediate and destabilizing. Eren knows her completely because, in some impossible sense, he is her. What begins as seduction becomes a dangerous struggle over identity, desire and control, as Margot can no longer tell whether she is falling in love with another person or surrendering to herself.

PSYCHE is an experimental black-and-white feature built around a radical formal premise: Margot Josephson is the film’s only principal live-action performer, while every other major character is an AI-generated transformation of her. Through performance, voice and digital transformation, one actress becomes an entire ensemble—male and female, young and old, powerful and forgotten, beautiful and broken.

The film’s central encounter is an audition between Margot and a mysterious elderly filmmaker in the tradition of Orson Welles. Margot performs live; the Director is created by transforming her into a man nearly seventy years older. The scene is both dramatic confrontation and proof of concept: AI does not replace the actor but extends a single human performance into an entire dramatic universe.

Los Angeles becomes Margot’s psychological underworld. Laurel Canyon, downtown streets, nightclubs, buses, beaches and Griffith Observatory merge with the ghosts of old Hollywood, including the house’s memories of choreographer Jack Cole and Marilyn Monroe. Shot in stark black and white, the film collides cinema’s past with its technological future, evoking the fractured identities of Persona, the unease of Psycho, the metaphysical mystery of Tarkovsky and the monumental presence of Welles.

At its heart, PSYCHE is not a story about technology. It is about an actress confronting every life she might have lived—and the version of herself she may be unable to survive.

If everyone we love is a reflection of ourselves, who are we really falling in love with?