Chyna Shepherd accompanies her friend, Laura Templeton, to her family's house in rural
Washington State for
Thanksgiving dinner. A
serial killer named Edgler Vess
invades the house and kills Laura and her family as Chyna hides in the killer's
RV. When Vess stops at a gas station, Chyna escapes and asks the two attendants to call the police. Before she has time to explain, Vess returns and torments the two workers before brutally killing them with a
shotgun. Chyna then learns that he is holding a 14-year-old girl named Ariel hostage in his basement. She becomes determined to save Ariel and uses one of the shopkeepers' cars to follow Vess back to his home. On the road she runs into a woman named Miriam and asks her to call the police. Miriam believes Chyna is disturbed and moves on. Miriam stops at the gas station and finds the shopkeepers' bodies, leading her to believe Chyna's story. She makes a hysterical phone call to the police, telling them that they "need to save Chyna and Ariel," which the police initially dismiss. Upon trying to fall back to sleep, a policeman, Ethan Trevaine, remembers the name Ariel from a
missing person's case and begins investigating. Meanwhile, Chyna's car runs out of gasoline and she abandons it in the middle of the road, forcing Vess to stop. As he pushes the car down an embankment, Chyna enters his RV and hides, unknowingly leaving footprints. Vess suspects another person has entered the RV but feigns obliviousness. He then kills Miriam when she tries to run him off the road and save Chyna. When they arrive at his home, Chyna attempts to free Ariel from a fortified room. She is attacked and subdued by Vess. As a captive, Chyna speaks with Vess and has flashbacks to her traumatic childhood: as a little girl, she witnessed her disturbed, abusive mother and her boyfriend kill her neighbors. In turn, Vess reveals his obsession with the "intensity" of any particular experience and declares his intention to kill both her and Ariel, offering Chyna a slightly more merciful death if she agrees to aid him in mentally torturing Ariel out of her
catatonia. The two have further
existential conversations regarding
God and the nature of
good and evil. When Vess is late returning to work after the Thanksgiving holiday, he makes up an excuse to his boss and departs, leaving Chyna chained to the dining room table. She watches in horror as one of Vess's other captives escapes from a drain hatch in his backyard, only to be mauled to death by his bloodthirsty
German Shepherds. Chyna manages to free herself and seizes the opportunity to escape with Ariel. After dressing in Vess's dog-training gear and spraying
ammonia in the eyes of his dogs, Chyna attempts to flee with Ariel in Vess's RV, but unwittingly triggers an alarm that causes him to return home early. Before they can make their escape, an unmarked vehicle and a police car arrive. Although Chyna believes Vess to be in the unmarked vehicle driven by Trevaine, it is revealed that Vess is actually a
sheriff who emerges from the police car and opens fire on Trevaine, killing him. Chyna and Ariel manage to escape back to Vess's house, where Chyna ultimately gets the better of Vess. She sets him on fire, confines him in Ariel's old room and watches as he burns to death. In the aftermath, Chyna visits Ariel in a psychiatric hospital but is denied custody of her; she is told that the young girl will require extensive therapy to recover from her trauma. As Chyna prepares to leave without her, Ariel, speaking for the first time, suddenly calls out to her the name "Badger", a character from a story Chyna had told her about to help bring her courage while escaping from Vess. The two embrace, and it is implied that Chyna's custody of Ariel was granted. ==Cast==