Kylie Ellison is tied to a chair in the dark. All alone, save for a single camera, capturing her every move. Who’s watching? What do they want? Why is she here? With no one else nearby, the camera becomes the vessel for her rage, grief, and fear, and memory.

As Kylie tries to confront her voyeuristic captor and escape her fate, her captivity becomes a primal confession – regurgitating her missed opportunities, her broken promises, and her crisis of self as the clock ticks down. Ultimately, her efforts fuse into one last desperate be to be remembered, leading to a final eerie and subversive twist to leave viewers of Kylie’s anguish questioning the whole experience.

TAPE is a thorny, tense, frantic scream stretched across a single take – a blistering examination of how far we’ll go to be seen.

Director’s Vision for ‘Tape’

How far will we go to show the world we’re real?

TAPE emerged from a shared nightmare – the self-tape, and the bizarre, harrowing world of the performance industry.

The story took shape through conversations between the writer/director/actor team of Peterson and Minnicino about the ways in which acting in the digital age calls on performers to prostrate themselves and bear their souls in terrifying circumstances on a dime. Corralling horror stories of performers asked to mime giving birth in 30 second iPhone videos for casting agents, memorizing pages of text. More and more the stories felt like torture porn, a voluntary degradation that artists must submit to for the chance to be seen, validated, and elevated in the industry.

TAPE jumps off from these ideas to quietly unpack the way individuals are tormented and contorted by the gaze of the viewer. Kylie makes her torture a confession booth and last-ditch memoir all at once, desperate to both understand and justify her life in what might be its last moments. What might be a Saw-esque killer-and-victim story becomes her determined fight for agency, reckoning with her own authenticity and hoping she has left something behind – only for the whole premise to be subverted as we realize that Kylie was in control the whole time, though still metaphorically a victim of the gaze of the viewer.

Anchored by a 10-minute, one-take virtuoso performance from actor McLean Peterson and a layered roller-coaster script from writer Minnicino, TAPE’s resolution blurs genre and reality – is this a once-in-a-lifetime moment of terror, or just another day for Kylie in an industry that wants her to be emotionally mutilated at the drop of a hat. Were her confessions real in any way, or simply the text on a scanned PDF sent to her by her agent for a lurid crime show, where she’ll play one of a thousand faceless victims? How much was her, how much was a brutal performance to score a role?

Developed by a microscopic team of collaborators, TAPE is an attempt to explore the terror of performance, control, and “submission.”