An unnamed Seattle couple—Willem Dafoe as the husband, a therapist, and Charlotte Gainsbourg as the wife—are unintentionally thrust into a brutal tragedy when their unsupervised infant Nic climbs to the bedroom window and falls to his death during a private moment. At the funeral, the wife collapses and spends a month in the hospital, her grief stubborn and atypical, while the husband grows skeptical of any conventional psychiatric care and decides to treat her himself through psychotherapy. He is drawn into a difficult, unsettling approach, aiming to coax her through her pain without medical mediation, while she reveals a chilling fear of nature that he tries to confront through exposure therapy.
They retreat to the remote Eden cabin in the woods, a place she had spent time in the previous summer writing a thesis that challenges gynocide. On the hike there, a deer with an unafraid gaze and a stillborn fawn hanging halfway out of her body adds a haunting prelude to the journey ahead. Within the sessions, the wife’s grief deepens into mania at times, and she begins to press for rough, controlling sex as the environment around them grows increasingly ominous: acorns rain down on the metal roof, the man wakes with a hand covered in tick bites, and a self-referential, ominous red fox speaks in a whispering way, telling him that “chaos reigns.”
In the attic, the husband discovers the wife’s thesis materials—violent depictions of witch hunts and a scrapbook whose handwriting becomes increasingly frantic. She confesses that, during her writing, she has come to believe that all women are inherently evil. He rebukes this claim, and in a frenzied moment they share a violent exchange at the base of a dead tree whose exposed roots intertwine with bodies, a stark image of their collapsing trust. He begins to sense that Satan may be the deepest fear she harbors.
After reviewing Nic’s autopsy photos and the images she shot at Eden, the man realizes a disturbing pattern: she had been tampering with Nic, a factor that contributes to his deformity. She attacks him in the shed, initiates sex again, and uses brutal means to overpower him, leaving him unconscious and struggling to free himself. She then inflicts further harm while he lies immobilized, and she throws the wrench she used under the cabin. He awakens and, unable to loosen the bolt, crawls into a foxhole at the base of the dead tree, listening for a crow’s cry before the woman locates him and nearly buries him again.
Night falls, and the woman, now remorseful, digs him out but cannot recall where the wrench is. She helps him back to the cabin and tells him that he can only die when the “Three Beggars” arrive. She recounts the night Nic climbed to the window and her deliberate letting him fall, exposing what she believes is her own inherent evil. In the cabin, she makes a drastic, symbolic cut, and soon the crow (despair), the deer (grief), and the fox (pain)—the Three Beggars—appear, a haunting trio that marks the turning point of their ordeal. A hailstorm erupts, echoing old myths about women accused of witchcraft summoning storms. When he finally locates the wrench, a struggle ensues and he manages to free himself, ultimately ending the threat by killing her and cremating her body on a pyre.
The man limps away from the cabin, eating wild berries as the Three Beggars watch in translucent, glowing silence. From a hill beneath a brilliant light, he witnesses a procession of hundreds of women—dressed in antiquated garments with their faces blurred—approaching him and then passing by, continuing deeper into the forest, leaving him to confront the forest’s unknowable mystery.
