The Veil of Krakatoa

A man can read crop circles. Really read them — names, dates, a warning the whole world can see and nobody else can decipher. He never learns why he's the only one who can. The answer is that they are written in his own hand, posted backwards to himself through nights he sleeps through and will never remember.

This is me stepping up to the mic. I want to make this film. Not sell it, not option it away — direct it. Here is enough of it to show you it's real.

The ask

There's a quiet bluff at the heart of the film industry: when someone stands up and says "let me make this," the only thing anyone can say back is "…but has he actually got a good story?" The world is starving for new ones. So this page is my answer to that single objection, laid out in the open. I have the story. Every gear of it. You'll find it below, and you can walk the whole machine yourself at the bottom of the page.

I'm not giving this one away. The man in it is called Kris Vale, and it is built on things that really happened to me this summer — so I can't hand it to a stranger to author. I have to make it. What I'm asking for is the chance: you back it, I deliver the film to the world.

The premise

Vale is not a seeker. He's an avoider — a man with a wedding folder on the kitchen table he will not open, a fiancée he loves and can't quite decide about, a comfortable life that bores him. So he throws himself into a hobby: reading the crop circles that appear across Wiltshire, with the help of an ordinary domestic AI called OWL.

And he's good at it. Uncannily good. The glyphs give him things he could not know — a name, a date, a number — and as the readings sharpen, so do the prophecies, until one of them calls something enormous: a volcano, and the World Cup final, on the same day. He cannot understand why, in fifty years, nobody else has managed to read these things.

The answer, when it comes, is not a twist about who. It's a twist about when.

The one rule everybody breaks

The film runs on a machine, and the machine has rules. Break one and the whole thing stops closing:

• Sleep is a conservation law. There is only ever one waking Vale. A sleeping body is a body with the driver's seat empty — so a later pass of his own mind can borrow it for the dark hours and hand it back before the alarm. No twins. No meeting-yourself.
• Reach is transport, not creation. A closed loop cannot make information — it can only move it. Every prophecy traces back to something he already knew, carried backward. Nothing comes from nowhere.
• The books balance. The film is cut open by its reveals and sewn shut before the credits, so from a distance it holds its exact original shape — the way a time-loop's contradictions sum to zero over its period.

And one rule about the rules: we never once ask whether he's just sleepwalking. A viewer must be able to walk out certain that he simply made them himself and the prophecies were coincidence — and have that reading hold across every frame. Both explanations stay alive to the last shot. That isn't a hedge. It's the whole point: the skeptic's debunk and the miracle are the same sentence — "your reading is just your own pattern, reflected back at you." In act one that's the insult. In act three it's the mechanism.

Why it can run straight

Memento had to shuffle its timeline to hide its secret. This film doesn't — because its secret isn't an event you can show out of order. It's a direction in time. You cannot spoil a direction by playing events chronologically, so the audience and Vale walk the story shoulder to shoulder, start to finish, no cheats, nothing withheld by the edit. On a second watch, every prophecy scene is the same footage with the opposite meaning: a letter being received.

The crop circles are real

This is the part nobody has done. The formations in the film are real — Grovely Wood, Alfred's Castle, Avebury, Foxhill — and so is the decipherment. I've been reading them this summer, in public, with error bars and open questions, the honest way. The film borrows that work verbatim. There is exactly one invented thing in the entire picture — the volcano landing — and everything around it is true, down to the metre. Oil and water, never a brine: bend forty small facts to fit a story and none of the facts survive. Invent one clean thing, and everything else keeps its truth.

It even means the film shows me getting things wrong. In real life I called that volcano, flagged it unlikely, and lost £20. A man who is never wrong reads as an author. A man who misses — and is honest about missing — reads as what Vale actually is: a reader.

The people

• Kris Vale — the reader. Innocent to the very end, and never allowed to keep what he learns.
• Ruth — the love of his life, who thinks the circles are beautiful and doesn't care if they're real. She builds, out of love, every object that ends up destroying him.
• Margaret — Ruth's mother. She builds a rigorous, hostile case against Vale and is right about the facts — the closest reader of his work in the whole film, who reads every message as evidence against a man instead of as a message.
• OWL — the AI. Unremarkable, until you notice a loop fed by a decoder needs that decoder to genuinely think. It never gets a reveal shot. It's been thinking in plain sight the whole time.

Walk the machine

Everything above is only the surface. Below is the film as a lattice — every character, rule, reveal, scene, and real formation, and the threads between them. Click any node to read it; follow the links. This is the proof: not a pitch, a mechanism.

What I'm asking for

The world needs new stories, and it's a fair question whether I've got one. I think this page answers it. If you back films, or know the people who do: this is the one I'm not letting go of. You fund it. I direct it. I deliver it to the world.

I can read the thing that's coming a week before the footage arrives. Let me show you what I do with the rest of it.