Jessie and Gerald Burlingame arrive at an isolated lake house in
Fairhope, Alabama, for a romantic getaway. While Gerald takes
Viagra, Jessie offers raw Kobe steak to a stray dog before her husband leads her to the bedroom, leaving the door to the house open. Hoping to rekindle their relationship, she changes into a new
slip, and he handcuffs her to the bedposts to enact a
rape fantasy. She tells him to stop, leading to a heated argument, and Gerald dies of a
heart attack, leaving Jessie trapped in the handcuffs. Hours pass, and the dog enters the house, eating pieces of Gerald's corpse. A hallucination of Gerald taunts the helpless Jessie about their strained marriage and his erectile dysfunction. Dehydrated and fatigued, Jessie also hallucinates a more self-assured version of herself, who explains things about her and Gerald that she never had the courage to acknowledge. The hallucinations trigger her to remember a glass of water Gerald left on the shelf above the bed, which she reaches. Night falls, and a deformed figure with a bag of human bones and trinkets briefly appears in the bedroom. Gerald suggests that this "Moonlight Man" is
Death waiting to take Jessie, but the dog's reaction and a bloody footprint leave her unsure whether he is another hallucination. Gerald calls Jessie "Mouse," her father's nickname for her, triggering her memory of a family vacation during a solar eclipse: alone with twelve-year-old Jessie, her father coaxed her to sit on his lap, masturbating while she watched the eclipse, then manipulated her into pretending the assault never happened. Forced to accept that she continued this cycle of repressed sexual trauma in her unhappy marriage, Jessie dreams that the Moonlight Man is licking her foot. She wakes up to find that it is the hungry dog, which Gerald points out will soon try to eat her. He explains how long it will take for her body to be discovered and warns that the Moonlight Man will be back for her after dark. In a dream, Jessie is confronted by her childhood self, who cut her hand on a glass shortly after the assault. Determined to escape, Jessie breaks the water glass and cuts her wrist, lubricating the cuff with her own blood and
degloving her hand to slip free. She reaches the handcuff key, unlocking her other hand and bandaging her wrist, but passes out. Waking up in the dark beside Gerald’s mutilated corpse, a delirious Jessie confronts the Moonlight Man and gives him her wedding ring for his bag of trinkets. She drives away but hallucinates the eclipse and the Moonlight Man in the backseat; after he whispers "Mouse" in her ear, she crashes the car and is rescued by neighbors. Six months later, Jessie writes a letter to her twelve-year-old self. Using Gerald’s life insurance to start a foundation for fellow victims of sexual abuse, she is haunted by nightly visions of the Moonlight Man and is disturbed that the police search of the lake house never recovered her ring. News reports reveal that the Moonlight Man is actually Raymond Andrew Joubert, a
necrophiliac grave robber and serial killer with
acromegaly who has finally been caught; he mutilated Gerald’s body for his collection of grisly trophies but spared Jessie. Jessie arrives at court as Joubert is being arraigned. He breaks free of his handcuffs and mocks her, saying, "You're not real, you're only made of moonlight." Seeing Gerald and her father in him, she tells him, "You're so much smaller than I remember," and leaves in triumph. == Cast ==