Lucy Bonnard, Jennifer Jason Leigh, is a young woman with a fragile mental health history who helps her older sister, Charlotte Bonnard, Judith Ivey, run Willows, the inn perched on their family’s Louisiana bayou plantation. The two sisters share a tight but tense bond, and the atmosphere around the Willows is thick with memory and unease. Lucy, a deeply sexually frustrated presence, is briefly courted by Etienne LeViolette, Benjamin Mouton a handyman who grew up with them, but his advances are rebuffed as she clings to the hope of stability in her sister’s world. Charlotte, meanwhile, is entangled in a romance with town sheriff Cleve Bonnard, Dennis Lipscomb, a relationship that dissolves as Cleve blames Charlotte’s relentless care for Lucy for driving a wedge between them.
Late one night, Matt Rutledge, Eric Stoltz, a congressional aide from Washington, D.C., arrives as a guest and immediately notices Lucy. He is drawn to her, and his presence adds a sharp tension to the bedroom politics of the Willows. The group is completed by three other guests—Mrs. Bettleheim, Anne Pitoniak, her daughter Fran, Natalija Nogulich, and son-in-law Lenny, Richard Minchenberg—who join the sisters for dinner. A storm soon cuts the power, and the mood turns from uneasy courtesy to eerie insinuation as Lucy entertains everyone with a ghost story about Jud Nevins, a man who vanished in the bayou years before. Lucy insists that other spirits protect her from Jud’s lingering presence, a notion that unsettles Etienne, who watches Matt’s growing interest with mounting anger.
That night, an unseen watcher skulks about the Willows—first from a hole in the attic floor, then slipping downstairs while Mrs. Bettleheim snacks in the kitchen. In the morning, the beloved dog Beaux is found murdered, a strike that shatters the fragile calm of the household and sends Lucy into a fresh hysterical spiral, blaming Jud’s ghost for the atrocity. Moments later, Etienne reappears at the house, accusing Charlotte of being Jud’s killer, a claim that further muddies the sisters’ already strained history. Later still, when Matt returns, Etienne stops him on the road and warns that Charlotte is dangerous, a warning that only deepens the conflict.
Cleve undertakes the grisly task of reviewing Jud’s missing-person file at the police station, and a startling photograph of Jud with a young boy who resembles Matt surfaces, hinting at a hidden kinship that will fuel the rising paranoia. Back at the Willows, Charlotte forbids Matt from seeing Lucy, and she locks Lucy in her room. Lucy manages to smash a window to signal Matt, who bursts upstairs and forces open the door. The two share a charged, clandestine encounter in Lucy’s bedroom, a moment that redefines Lucy’s sense of danger and desire.
A flood of repressed memories follows. While Lucy bathes, she recalls a Fourth of July memory—one threaded through Etienne’s presence in her life—where she and Etienne played hide‑and‑seek in a nearby graveyard and witnessed Charlotte being assaulted by Jud. Lucy’s attempt to intervene ended with Jud’s brutal attack on her, prompting Charlotte to stab Jud to death and to dispose of his corpse in the bayou. When Charlotte sends Lucy back to the graveyard to retrieve Jud’s baseball cap, Lucy glimpses the silhouette of a boy from afar, whom she mistakenly believes to be Etienne. The memory unsettles Lucy, leaving her haunted by what could be real and what could be imagined.
A new danger materializes as a man wearing Jud’s jacket and baseball cap seems to stalk Lucy outside. Etienne is soon afterward shot with a bow and arrow in the bayou by an unseen assailant, crawling to the front porch of his shack as the attacker closes in. The killer is revealed to be Matt, Jud’s younger brother, the boy Lucy had seen in the graveyard who, until now, had seemed only a memory from the past. Matt flees, and Lucy arrives at Etienne’s shack just as he dies, realizing the full scope of the tragedy.
Back at the Willows, Lucy returns to Charlotte, who cannot shield her from the hard truth: Matt is the killer, manipulating Charlotte to avenge his brother’s death. A brutal confrontation ensues in which Charlotte asserts that Matt’s motive has nothing to do with love, and Lucy accuses her sister of having preserved a terrible secret to keep them safe. The truth becomes the tragedy: Matt’s manipulation is exposed, and Lucy, overwhelmed, flees into the bayou, stumbling toward the place where Jud’s body was hidden years earlier. Matt follows, attempting to drown her in the swamp, but hands rise from beneath the water and pull him under, killing him. A mist rolls in as ghostly figures—among them Etienne—emerge briefly and then fade away, leaving Lucy alone with the fog and the memory of what happened.
In the aftermath, Lucy helps Charlotte prepare for her upcoming wedding to Cleve at the Willows. The final image is quietly unsettling: while gazing into a mirror, Lucy experiences a vision of Matt breaking through the glass and attacking her; she starts in terror, then recognizes that the vision is only a nightmare—a reminder that the past lingers, the bayou keeps its secrets, and the truth remains as slippery as the fog that settles over the Willows. The story closes on a note of wary calm and lingering dread, suggesting that some memories and hauntings never truly fade.
