The Abyss Gazes Back is the dark tale of alcoholic womanizing Columbia graduate student Bryan Debroux who slides slowly into depression and loses himself in his own mind. He is followed from a typical morning when he awakes next to a naked woman he had never seen before after an average night of black-out drunkenness through the drug and alcohol induced haze of his daily life. Moving through his days with him are a secret love, a fellow melancholic Columbia student and an untraditional priest as he sinks deeper and deeper into the abyssal depths of existential crisis.