Karin Hayes escapes the confines of New York City and lands in a quaint New England town free of monoculture. Everything is a realistic version of perfect, teetering on the edge of a sublime daydream. With her husband Brett and stepdaughter Alex, Karin finally has the chance to create the life she dreamed of and savors the opportunity to let go of a troubled familial past.
A progressive, a vegetarian, a care-taker, an environmentalist, Karin does it all without a hint of martyrdom or superiority. She only thinks of the ultimate goal of having a child of her own and strives to one day be the parent she never had. Whether it’s making her cleaning lady lunch, picking up litter of the road, avoiding exploitive media, or making non-toxic cleaning products to sell on Etsy, Karin walks the walk.
This idealized existence is cut short when a mysterious neighbor, Susan, emerges on the outskirts of Karin’s new found bubble. We get a preview of an inciting incident when she first catches sight of Susan, “whose hair and makeup subtly suggests another time,” at a stoplight smoking a cigarette. “Who smokes anymore?” Susan pulls away and her latest inhale is then exhaled by Karin in a puff of smoke accompanied by a foreign deep cough. This ignites a supernatural connection between these two woman that will manifest realities adjacent to our own.
This unsettling event haunts Karin in the background as she attempts to resume normal. However, the cough persists. As Karin grows more sick, and left home alone, she over does it with OTC medications and shameless reality TV. This opens a window to addictive behavior she thought she shut out long ago.
Susan comes to greet Karin and welcome her to the neighborhood. Her accent is slight, but distinctly Swedish. The interaction is strained and leaves Karin uneasy. She’s repelled by their polarity, but is also unexpectedly drawn by a strange familiarity. This curiosity about Susan grows as Karin spots her around town, follows her, and eventually runs into her in a restaurant bathroom. Karin lets down her guard after the rare occasion of enjoying some champagne, and the two start a peculiar kinship.
Karin’s upper middle class reality sharply and suddenly shifts when she wakes up with a hangover and finds a fridge full of processed meats. Her Neoclassical Colonial swapped for a modest Cape with all the fixings of a basic big box store. Karin is awestruck by these changes but soon starts to except her new life with Susan joining her as if they were best friends. Once a distant neighbor, she now lives right next door.
All Karin’s relationships start to strain as her consumption of exploitive media, bad food and good drugs demands her focus as she enters the waste land of suburban homogeneity. As all her hopes and dreams become only something seen on TV, she falls into a darker abyss of fear and paranoia only to embrace the arms of Susan as she pushes all the good people in her life away. Her dream percolates back up when the results of a pregnancy test reveal an untimely development.
Karin awakens from that reality and into another as she emerges from tub of bloody water due to a miscarriage. Hope is lost. This new existence bring her into a dilapidated duplex, sparsely furnished apartment with random hand-me-downs and dead house plants. Once a thriving upper middle class housewife now works for a big box store, leans on self medicating, and has child protective services knocking at her door. With her world closing in on her, Karin’s descent is stark and quick as she becomes violently desperate to retrieve the life she once had. In her drug fueled state, Susan convinces her this is possible, pushing her to the edge of sanity and potentially unspeakable acts.