Ten years after the end of apartheid, a sense of unease and dread still permeates a South African community at the foot of the Drakensberg Mountains, where an unsolved massacre from years before continues to haunt the villagers. In this fraught milieu, a powerful British landowner, Angus bullies his beautiful and bewildered wife Olive and exploits the neediness of his day laborers, including Samuel, who is raising a young son after the death of his French missionary wife. Estelle fights to maintain her spirited sense of self, while carrying for the mentally incapacitated Mattis and sleeping with brutish Angus for money. However, it's in the harshly beautiful killing fields of the South African Great Escarpment that a final reckoning threatens to arrive for all.