Jo and Ash are weeks away from finishing high school and until now they have done everything together. Jo is a fixture in Ash’s wealthy home and custodian of her coveted journals but as the freedom of adulthood awaits, Jo is lonelier than ever as signs Ash is slipping away from her fuel a deep anxiety. When Jo causes an accident, drunk driving on the West Gate Bridge, Ash is killed instantly. Jo survives. Ash’s parents, Alex and Rae, are left broken in the ruins of a family, badly navigating their grief and care for their younger daughter, Jane. Jo and single mother, Mandy, wade through the weight of Jo’s fatal mistake and her inevitable prison sentence, while confronting their broken relationship. Jo’s court-appointed lawyer, Sarah, takes on the case, bringing her own history with the bridge to the forefront, a friend’s suicide from the bridge years earlier.

Interweaving with present day events is the story of Antonello, Ash’s grandfather who worked on the construction of the West Gate Bridge and narrowly survived its fatal collapse 50 years earlier. He has suffered undiagnosed PTSD ever since, suspended in time with the falling bridge, and has been a distant father as a result. His granddaughter’s death triggers an unravelling and a reckoning. Facing the futility of living a life stuck in survivor’s guilt, Antonello is able to offer insight into finding a lifeagain after the darkness and self-forgiveness to his grieving son, and also to Jo.

Based on the book “The Bridge” by Enza Gandolfo.