Hellbound began with a line from David Graeber’s book Debt: The First 5,000 Years: “Citizens are taught to think of themselves as sinners, seeking some kind of purely individual redemption to have the right to any sort of moral relations with other human beings at all.”

What struck me about this idea was the quiet violence embedded within it; the suggestion that before we can belong, before we can be loved, we must first “fix” ourselves. The film grows from that premise. The individual becomes both judge and executioner, performing destructive acts of self-correction in order to deserve connection with others.

Hellbound is, ultimately, a meditation on what happens when the desire to be worthy becomes indistinguishable from the impulse to punish oneself.