Last Train Home

SYNOPSIS: As he’s led toward the death chamber, convicted murderer Robert Earl Deemer recounts the final moments of his life—not to a priest or guard, but to John, a gentle, whimsical presence who exists somehow inside Robert’s head. John encourages him through the ritual with quiet compassion. Strapped in, Robert offers his last words: “If I could change things, I probably would.”

Somewhere between life and death, Robert finds himself seated with John in an abandoned railroad depot. John suggests that change may still be possible. There’s a way back—but it won’t be easy, and it won’t be clean. Robert must board the next train and think of a time. Bewildered, desperate, and out of options, Robert steps aboard.

He arrives at a familiar old depot in Bethel County. The year is 1971.

Back in the death chamber, a prison doctor checks the executed man’s body—only to find a faint, lingering pulse.

Robert races toward an abandoned barn, trying to stop a moment that defined his life forever: his father’s suicide. He arrives too late. Under John’s guidance, Robert jumps forward two years, landing in 1973, where he’s picked up by Sue Kaneeley, the mother of his former girlfriend, Sarah. Sue offers him her spare room—once her husband’s private “getaway,” before he “just got away.”

Reuniting with Sue and Sarah is painful, but nothing prepares Robert for meeting Bobby—himself at eighteen: angry, reckless, and hollowed out by his father’s violent death. Already veering toward disaster, Bobby wants nothing to do with this stranger who claims to have known his father in Vietnam, even after Robert confides that his own father “checked out the same way.”

Guided—and occasionally tested—by John, Robert stays close, enduring violence, humiliation, and heartbreak: a brutal beating from Bobby and his friends Luke and Jason, a reckless joyride toward an oncoming train, and the quiet devastation of watching his mother Lillian, still alive, numbing herself with codeine as she bears the scars of her husband’s suicide.

As July 4 approaches, Robert discovers the pivotal event that once sealed his fate. Bobby, Luke, and Jason plan to blow up the town’s water tower as a diversion while they rob the Bethbary bank. But something new emerges—a moment Robert never faced in his original life: Bobby must decide whether he’s capable of killing. If Robert can stop that choice, everything might change.

Bobby appears to choose differently—until Robert sees him heading toward the bank anyway. Has nothing changed? Has Robert failed?

Robert rushes to the bank for one last chance, only to find Bobby gone. Instead, Robert is arrested inside by Officer Dilly, taking the fall for a crime that may no longer belong to Bobby. In jail, Robert follows John’s final instruction: when his mission is complete, speak John’s name. The cell cannot hold him. John returns Robert to the abandoned train station, congratulates him on a job well done—and tells him it’s time to go back. Confused but trusting, Robert steps into a blinding wall of light.

In Bethbary, 1973, Bobby emerges transformed—alive with purpose, ready to make different choices. In 1999, a body is wheeled from the death chamber—also changed.

The past has been rewritten. And so has the man who helped it happen.