Love Is A Stranger
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FORMAT: Full length feature

COMP: She meets Only Lovers Left Alive

Pages: 98

LOGLINE: When a drifting young artist enters a blood pact with a mysterious, centuries-old woman who promises him success and recognition, his career explodes and his lover grows younger — but as his own life begins to burn out, he must confront the true cost of being seen before he disappears entirely.

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LOVE IS A STRANGER is a contemporary Gothic fable about ambition, mortality, and the hidden cost of being seen. Johnny Lyle, a drifting twenty-six-year-old illustrator, scrapes by selling toiletries door-to-door while dreaming of an art career that never seems to begin. When he knocks on the door of Aveline De Clare, a wealthy seventy-two-year-old widow, he is drawn into her world of quiet elegance, grief, and unnerving generosity. Aveline offers Johnny a supernatural pact: her blood will grant him vitality, talent, and access to a life he has only imagined — but it comes at a price. Johnny knowingly accepts, choosing acceleration over obscurity, and his career explodes as Aveline transforms alongside him, revealing herself to be centuries old and sustained by those she elevates.

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As Johnny’s success grows, his personal life fractures. His childhood friend Diane, who harbours unspoken love for him, becomes suspicious of Aveline and uncovers her impossible history. Johnny’s parents, still broken by the death of their other son and his mother’s creeping dementia, remind him of the ordinary, finite life he has abandoned. While Aveline flourishes, Johnny begins to age rapidly, realising too late that his “legacy” will outlive him but never belong to him. In the end, violence and loss claim Diane and Johnny, while Aveline survives to continue her endless cycle, carrying his art — and his memory — forward. Love Is a Stranger is a slow-burn meditation on success, desire, and the seduction of being chosen, asking whether a life that burns brightly is worth the darkness it leaves behind.