The Gallows Seed

In the isolated mountain hamlet of Westwood Hollow, state surveyor Elias Merrill returns to investigate a disability claim, only to find his own traumatic childhood reawakening. As he mechanically enforces the cold logic of distant bureaucracies, the villagers convene an ancient oak court that condemns him as the embodiment of institutional indifference. A chronicle of how a seed of guilt, buried in childhood abandonment, blossoms into a fatal harvest under adult neglect, all witnessed by the eternal vultures.