A haunted and jarring fiction, Highway 403, mile 39 draws on the autobiographical as it explores one mother’s struggle to piece together disparate memories of the lost moment before a tragic car accident.

Shifting vantage points between mother, father and son, the film questions our sense of order and reality. Fragments of the accident partially repeat and overlap, at times truncated, at others extended, each time offering the driver a different ending to the story. Ultimately, we are presented with the mother’s wish to reverse time with the simple wishful thought “what if?” As the narrative continually shifts perspective, we are uncertain if there ever will be an ending or whether the mother will continue to replay new versions of the nightmarish events to infinity like the endless highway before her.

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