A trending lip gloss promises people access to their “true selves,” and Los Angeles eagerly takes the bait. As the city slips into a feverish choreography of beauty, certainty, and spectacle, one Sephora employee must figure out how to break a spell built from hunger, performance, and the fantasy of instant becoming.

Century City gleams like paradise until one woman sees the mouths moving without swallowing, the reflections nodding when the bodies do not, and the mannequins stepping quietly down from their pedestals. Beneath the mall’s flawless surfaces waits a horror of assimilation, where the final luxury is becoming perfectly still.