Last Kind Word follows a Man employed to patrol a graveyard in October of 1893. His employment is due to the fear of premature burial that has since seen a mythology emerge around it. In the 19th century the fear of premature burial prompted the invention of safety coffins. These coffins put a string in the hands of the recently interred and attached the other end of the string to a bell. Those buried alive could ring the bell to inform those on the surface that they were alive. The Man’s job is to roam the graveyard at night listening for the ringing of bells. His work is lonely and isolating and one night he hears the ringing of a bell and he digs up a buried human being. To his horror, he discovers that the man he uncovers has clearly been dead for days. Did he really hear the bell or is the isolation of the job getting to him? His motivations become suspicious when he is compelled to dig up a second body. The result is an unsettling confrontation that brings him closer to the interred people he portends to help than he ever intended. Using the fear and mythology of premature burial Last Kind Word merges Edgar Allan Poe’s sense of the macabre and the feel of an old traditional blues song. The resulting film employs an antiquated cinematic style reminiscent of Guy Maddin to create a darkly ironic folktale about the inevitability of our own mortality.