In the Light of the Afternoon is a surrealist narrative that explores the dissolution of the self through dream, archetypes, and the uncanny. Set within a historic Abbey in Los Angeles, the film follows Emily as she drifts through three cycles—waking life, dream, and nightmare—each escalating in anxiety and disorientation. Drawing from Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) and Kenneth Anger’s Rabbit’s Moon (1972), the work reinterprets mid-20th-century experimental cinema through a contemporary lens, staging a hallucinatory exploration of identity and transformation.

Within the dream, Emily encounters a trio of archetypal figures: Mirror Face, an ominous guide who orchestrates her fate; Pierrot the Clown, a fleeting helper whose interventions prove helpless; and Glamour Girl, a Lynchian femme-fatale whose presence foreshadows Emily’s inevitable collapse. Dolls scattered throughout the Abbey observe these encounters as uncanny doubles, culminating in Emily’s confrontation with her own doll döppleganger. Anchored by recurring motifs, such as the magnolia flower, the film constructs a visual and symbolic system that examines cycles of naivety, inquiry, and dissolution.