Concept, Screenwriting, Direction, AI Production, Editing
ELSWHERE. Original
2026
The Story
To escape the past, we have to confront it.
PERIAPSIS is the first original film from ELSWHERE - a 35-minute science-fiction survival drama and romantic thriller about memory, love, and the identities we inherit.
After crash-landing on an apparently abandoned planet near a black hole, nineteen-year-old soldier Cael Arden survives with little memory of who he is. Guided by his military AI, TAC, he follows the remnants of a mission he no longer understands. Orders offer certainty when almost everything else is missing.
Then he encounters Ren Calder, a man who claims they once loved each other. Cael cannot remember him, but the familiarity he feels refuses to disappear. As asteroid impacts, hostile machinery, and a closing escape window push them forward, Cael must decide what deserves his trust: the soldier he was trained to be, or the feelings he cannot yet explain.
The Idea
For me, at its deepest level, PERIAPSIS is about the difference between remembering who you were trained to be and deciding who you are (Becoming you/Coming-out).
Cael believes recovering his past will tell him what to do. Instead, each returning fragment pulls him in a different direction. A promise can be sincere without remaining right forever. What feels like duty can become a way of avoiding uncertainty. And surviving does not mean someone else’s loss was your fault.
His relationship with Ren gives the film its emotional center. Their intimacy lives in recognition, touch, and quiet familiarity rather than grand declarations. Ren does not choose for Cael. He helps him recognize that he still has a choice. Beneath the survival story is a queer coming-of-age journey: learning to distinguish who you were taught to be from who you want to become.
Created through AI-assisted filmmaking, PERIAPSIS places this intimate character drama inside a planetary catastrophe. Wet forests, cold mountain terrain, grounded military technology, and an increasingly red sky give the world its physical weight. The scale is cosmic; the stakes remain personal.
Periapsis as the central metaphor
The title is particularly strong because it works on three levels.
Astronomically, periapsis is the point in an orbit closest to the body being orbited.
Narratively, Cael and Ren must move dangerously close to the black hole to gain enough velocity to escape.
Emotionally, Cael only finds a way forward when he stops avoiding the things that exert the greatest pull on him:
- his trauma
- his guilt
- his memories
- Ren
- and the possibility that the identity he built around duty was never entirely his own.
The way out requires moving closer first.
That is PERIAPSIS.
As ELSWHERE’s first project, the film introduces the studio’s purpose: giving stories a chance to exist that might otherwise remain unmade.
Watch PERIAPSIS
