Martin Swann moves into an old house and finds a box of video cassettes in the garden shed. One of them is a bootleg copy of a morbid and disturbing film by little-known French director, Jean Rien. Martin begins a search for the director’s other films, and for a way to understand Rien’s filmography, drawing him away from his home and his lover into a shadowy realm of secrets, rituals and creeping decay. An encounter with a crazed film journalist in Gravesend leads to drug-fuelled visions in Paris – and finally to the Mexican desert where a grim revelation awaits.