On February 22, 1862, Abraham Lincoln’s beloved son Willie is laid to rest in a marble crypt in a Georgetown cemetery. That very night, in the midst of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln arrives at the cemetery shattered by grief and, under cover of darkness, visits the crypt to spend time with his son’s body. Set over the course of that one night and narrated by a chorus of ghosts of the recently passed and the long dead, “Lincoln in the Bardo” is a thrilling exploration of death, grief, and the powers of good and evil.

The experience places the viewer in the perspective of a dead soul, newly arrived in a cemetery. Another new arrival – Willie Lincoln – is there as well. He is a little gentlemen, a sickly child, who is frightened and searching for his father. The viewer is then “welcomed” by a series of dead spirits, each of whom delivers a monologue about their lives. The spirits are unwilling to admit that they’re dead, insisting that they will soon recover and return to their past lives. With the entire weight of evidence against them, the only way that these dead souls can maintain the fiction that they are merely ill and will recover is by constantly retelling monologues about their lives, which they neurotically recite to the viewer.

The experience was written and directed by Graham Sack based on the bestselling novel by acclaimed author George Saunders, which debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and won the Booker Prize. The experience is the first-ever direct adaptation of a novel into virtual reality and was produced by NYT VR, Plympton, Sensorium, and Graham Sack, with collaboration from Penguin Random House. The Molecule created the visual effects with spatialized audio by SilVR Sound.

Written & Directed by Graham Sack
Technical Direction & Cinematography by Sensorium
Original Compositions by SilVR Sound