Ultrasound, in Five Parts
An original condensed retelling of Rob Schroeder's 2021 film
Part 1: A Stranded Traveler
On a rainy night, a man named Glen suffers car trouble after hitting a spike strip and seeks shelter at the nearby home of a married couple, Art and Cyndi. The couple welcomes him in with an unusually blunt, oversharing hospitality, discussing everything from Art's antidepressant schedule to the strange circumstances of how they first met, all while Glen stands dripping in their kitchen.
Art, explaining that his medication has severely dampened his and Cyndi's intimate life together, makes an extraordinary request of his unexpected houseguest: he asks Glen to sleep with Cyndi that night, framing it as a genuine, if deeply unconventional, attempt to help his unhappy wife rather than as anything predatory or fetishistic on his part.
Glen, disoriented and uncertain, goes along with the bizarre arrangement, setting in motion a chain of events whose true nature, and true purpose, remains carefully hidden from both Glen and the audience for a long stretch of the film that follows.
Part 2: A Pregnancy, and a Senator's Secret
Some time later, Art unexpectedly resurfaces in Glen's life to deliver startling news: Cyndi is pregnant, and Art pleads with Glen to build a relationship with her and take on the responsibility of fatherhood himself, despite the strangeness of how their single encounter came about.
In a seemingly unrelated storyline, a young woman named Katie is having an affair with Alex Harris, an ambitious senator in the middle of a reelection campaign. Katie is visibly pregnant herself, yet strangely, entirely unaware of her own condition, kept willfully sequestered in an apartment Harris has arranged for her to protect his public image and marriage from scandal.
Both storylines, though appearing entirely separate at first, share a hidden common thread: Art himself, whose real occupation turns out to involve a form of experimental hypnosis technology using sound frequencies, technology he's secretly using to manipulate memory, perception, and even physical sensation in both Cyndi and Katie without their conscious awareness.
Part 3: The Research Facility
A researcher named Shannon works under Dr. Connors at a shadowy research facility investigating the same underlying hypnotic sound-frequency technology, running sessions with Glen and Cyndi, who have by now become patients there, with Glen mysteriously suffering from psychosomatic paralysis in his legs.
Shannon gradually uncovers a troubling truth: Dr. Connors and Art were originally research partners developing this technology together before Art broke away to pursue his own agenda, and Connors himself has ambitions to pitch the hypnotic technology to military contractors and investors as a tool for inducing paralysis and control during public demonstrations and unrest.
Disturbed by this revelation and by how thoroughly her own research has been weaponized without her full knowledge or consent, Shannon begins to question the ethics of the entire project, setting up a moral reckoning that will eventually push her to act against the facility she works for.
Part 4: The Truth Unravels
The full scope of Art's scheme comes into focus: he had been hired directly by Senator Harris to keep Katie hypnotically unaware of her own pregnancy during his campaign, while simultaneously engineering Glen and Cyndi's entire relationship and false pregnancy, all so that Katie's child could eventually be quietly passed off to Glen and Cyndi without anyone uncovering the senator's affair.
When Harris mistakenly believes Art has personally slept with Katie, he violently attacks him in a jealous rage. In the aftermath, Art, whether out of spite or self-preservation, reverses the hypnotic suggestions he had placed on Katie, abruptly restoring her awareness of her own reality after months of engineered ignorance.
Outraged by the full extent of what her research has enabled, Shannon makes the decision to help Glen and Cyndi physically escape the facility, breaking through to a hidden lower level and confronting Dr. Connors directly before fleeing with both of them in tow.
Part 5: Who Really Escaped
The film's final stretch deliberately undercuts any clean sense of triumph. As Glen and Cyndi believe they're finally driving to freedom, small visual details, like raindrops running straight down the car window rather than streaking backward as they would in a genuinely moving vehicle, quietly suggest that their escape may itself be nothing more than another layer of hypnotic illusion.
Glen, even as he seems to leave the facility behind, still finds physical evidence of Art's earlier suggestions lingering in his reality, including a lottery ticket Art once hypnotically convinced him was hidden in his own sock, blurring the line entirely between what Glen has genuinely escaped and what remains a carefully constructed delusion.
In the film's closing scene, Art appears at one of Senator Harris's public campaign events, quietly adjusting a small sound device in his own ear, a clear implication that he has now turned his hypnotic technology on Harris himself, suggesting that whatever chain of manipulation Glen and Cyndi were caught inside has simply moved up to ensnare an even more powerful target, with no guarantee anyone in the story has truly escaped anything at all.
This piece is an original condensed adaptation summarizing the plot of Rob Schroeder's Ultrasound, written for general audiences and not a reproduction of the original film or its source graphic novel.
Still Struggling to Understand the Cult Following Around Ultrasound? Use This Cheat Sheet
A lo-fi indie sci-fi mystery box that made just under $3,000 at the box office and still built a genuine cult following. Here's what you need to know.
Q: What's it actually about, in one sentence?
After his car breaks down, a man named Glen takes shelter with a strange married couple, setting off a tangled, disorienting plot involving a philandering senator, a shadowy hypnotic research facility, and a mind-control device that gradually reveals nearly every character's memories and relationships to have been secretly manipulated.
Q: Was this a hit when it came out, or did it flop?
Financially, it flopped in the most extreme sense possible, earning a reported total box office of just $2,908. Critically, though, it built a genuine following: it premiered at both the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival and Fantasia Fest, and became the kind of low-budget discovery that critics and genre fans champion specifically because of its ambition relative to its resources, in director Rob Schroeder's feature debut.
Q: So why does everyone still bring this film up today?
Because it's become a favorite reference point for fans of deliberately disorienting "mystery box" science fiction, films that withhold explanation for as long as possible and reward patient, attentive viewing. Screenwriter Conor Stechschulte adapted it from his own graphic novel, Generous Bosom, and director Rob Schroeder has cited John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate as a major influence, situating the film squarely in a lineage of Cold War-style paranoia and mind-control thrillers updated for an indie sci-fi register.
Q: What's the one line people quote from this?
Dr. Connors, defending his willingness to court military contractors for funding, delivers the film's most quoted piece of dialogue when he says researchers today "have to be a sheep in wolves' clothing," a cynical inversion of the usual saying that captures the film's broader theme of institutions and individuals disguising harmful intentions behind reassuring appearances.
Q: Is this really just a sci-fi thriller, or is there a deeper meaning?
The film is fundamentally about memory and consent: nearly every major character turns out to be operating on manipulated memories or false realities imposed by someone else, whether for personal, romantic, or overtly political gain. Critics have specifically read Katie's storyline, a woman kept hypnotically unaware of her own pregnancy to protect a powerful man's public image, as a pointed, exaggerated metaphor for gaslighting rendered literal through science-fiction technology.
Q: Why do people find this one frustrating, despite its cult reputation?
Multiple critics have flagged the same specific complaint: the film builds an impressively tense, mysterious atmosphere for most of its runtime, only for the final act's cluster of revelations to feel rushed or underwhelming relative to the mystery that preceded them. Its structure, deliberately jumping between several seemingly unconnected storylines with little clear sense of timeline, is also disorienting by design, which some viewers find rewarding and others find simply confusing.
Q: What's a high-value, low-effort trivia fact I can drop about this?
The film's supposedly happy, escape-to-freedom ending contains a subtle visual clue undercutting it entirely: as Glen and Cyndi believe they're driving away to safety, the raindrops on the car window run perfectly straight down rather than streaking backward the way they would in an actually moving vehicle, a small detail suggesting their escape may itself be just another layer of hypnotic illusion.
Q: What context actually unlocks the rest of this film?
Know that the film is based on Conor Stechschulte's graphic novel Generous Bosom, and that Stechschulte insisted on writing the screenplay adaptation himself specifically because he didn't yet know where the full story was going and wanted to be the one steering that journey, suggesting the film's deliberate ambiguity was baked into its source material from the start rather than added later for effect.
Q: Got a second quote I can use — something from criticism rather than the film?
Slant Magazine's review described the film as revealing its characters to be buried under "layers within layers of mentally constructed reality," comparing it to "a less fleshy version of eXistenZ," a sharp, quotable comparison to David Cronenberg's own reality-questioning science fiction that instantly signals the film's genre lineage.
Q: Cheat sheet vs. actually experiencing it — what's the honest verdict?
Worth watching if you enjoy films that deliberately withhold explanation and reward close attention, though it's fair to go in with tempered expectations about the ending given how consistently critics flag the final act as a slight letdown relative to the mystery built up before it. Its visually distinct, neon-heavy cinematography and genuinely committed cast performances make it worth experiencing directly rather than settling for a plot summary alone.
This piece paraphrases and contextualizes publicly documented history and criticism about Ultrasound; direct quotations are limited to one line from the film itself and one line from a published Slant Magazine review.