Dorine Carol Kane is a magazine editor who, due to budget cuts, must work from home. One night, she is called to help fix the computer of a coworker, Gary Michaels David Thornton, who is electrocuted while attempting the fix. Dorine dials 911, but hangs up when the line is answered. She loads the body onto a cart, wheels it out to her car, and tucks the corpse into her basement, where it becomes the first chilling presence in a sequence that unfolds with unsettling, unmotivated violence.
As the tension climbs, Dorine embarks on a murder spree that begins with the death of another office worker and quickly escalates in brutality and secrecy. The terror expands beyond the office walls when two young Girl Scouts arrive at her door to sell cookies. The first cookie seller, Linda the Girl Scout Julia McIlvaine, and her companion, the second Girl Scout Cleopatra St. John, become part of the growing grisly collection in the basement. Dorine is seen calmly eating the cookies as she continues her work on a new laptop, a disturbing image that underscores the cold, detached nature of her acts.
Dorine begins sending messages from Gary to the remaining office workers, implying that he is alive and watching. Three more murders follow, each carried out with a stark, almost artful precision that adds to the film’s eerie atmosphere. The office manager, Norah Reed Jeanne Tripplehorn, awakens in the basement after being knocked out during a lunch date. The haunting scene is intensified when the office manager’s boyfriend, Daniel Birch Michael Imperioli, arrives with a kitchen knife, trying to uncover the truth. Dorine then delivers a final, calculated strike against Norah Reed, taunting her for forcing the staff to work from home and sealing the manager’s fate.
In the closing sequence, the darkness of Dorine’s world deepens following her mother’s death. She sets the basement on fire, then, donning a blond wig and makeup, drives away in her car with the office manager’s head in a bag on the seat beside her. The final image lingers on Dorine circling a newspaper ad for an office job, a chilling hint that the cycle of detachment and violence may continue beyond the frame.
