[1][4] In New York City, Richie (Shawn Christensen), a downtrodden young man whose girlfriend, Vista (Isabelle McNally), recently disappeared, discovers the corpse of a girl who died from a heroin overdose while he is cleaning bathroom stalls at a nightclub.

At his apartment, Richie attempts suicide by cutting one of his wrists in a bathtub, when he receives a call from his estranged sister, Maggie (Emmy Rossum), asking him to look after her eleven-year-old daughter, Sophia (Fátima Ptacek).

Gideon informs him that his girlfriend has been missing for a day, with her last whereabouts being at Bill's nightclub, and produces a photograph, which Richie recognizes as being of the dead woman he saw the night before.

He brings Sophia to his former apartment in a downtrodden part of town, where he retrieves some flip books and calms his panicked niece by presenting the premise of a girl who dies in intricate ways, but comes back by the next installment.

Richie and Sophia visit Bill, who divulges that Gideon's girlfriend had been resisting his advances and in retaliation, he gave her heroin.

[1] Simultaneous with the home media distribution of Before I Disappear, IFC released the film on November 28, 2014, on video on demand via Amazon.com and iTunes.

[9] Moviefone called it "visually daring, nearly wondrous, and might be the best late night New York movie since Martin Scorsese's After Hours.

[11] Eric Kohn of Indiewire rated it B− and wrote that the film "contains all the strong moments that distinguished Curfew while surrounding them with a lot of superfluous additions".

[12] Mark Adams of Screen Daily described it as "a stylish and beautifully shot adaptation, strong on performance and a nicely nuanced script, but in the end perhaps lacking an expanded story to suit its feature length.

"[13] David Rooney of The Hollywood Reporter wrote a negative review, in which he criticized the writing and flow of the film as being sporadic, but gave credit to the performances of the actors.