In 1879, in the Dakota Territory, the Stewart family is attacked by a shadowy force. A few corpses are found in the morning, Maryanne, Jocelin Donahue, remains missing, and eerie holes pockmark the ground around the houses. A military-backed search party is assembled, led by Doug Hutchison Henry Victor, and joined by frontiersman John Clay, Clancy Brown, with his Irish immigrant assistant Fergus Coffey, Karl Geary. The group also includes former soldier Will Parcher, William Mapother, his girlfriend’s teenage son Dobie Spacks, Galen Hutchison, and Victor’s chef and former slave Walnut Callaghan, Sean Patrick Thomas.
That night, the team forces a Sioux tribe member to speak, and Victor tortures him for information. The captive warns of the “Burrowers,” creatures that feast on human flesh, a claim the group initially mistakes for a misidentified tribe. Not long after, four of Victor’s men vanish, and the same unsettling holes appear nearby. Tensions rise, and disgusted by Victor’s distrust of the Natives, Clay, Coffey, Parcher, Spacks, and Callaghan abandon the escort and strike out on their own.
The misfit group traces the strange burrowed ground and discovers a catatonic woman buried in one of the holes, bearing injuries similar to the Stewart bodies. Spacks is tasked with bringing her back to Fort Lincoln, but that night the Burrowers ambush him. They kill the woman, slash his neck, and bury him alive. In another brutal moment, Clay is shot by Burrowers and dies; the remaining party escapes by burning poison oak to deter their attackers, but Parcher is wounded when a Burrower attack strikes Callaghan’s leg.
Guided by a smoke signal, the survivors meet Faith, a Native woman whose family was wiped out by the Burrowers. She explains how the creatures operate: they paralyze victims with a toxin delivered by injury, bury them alive, and wait for the body to decompose before feeding. The Burrowers used to subsist on buffalo, but white settlement nearly annihilated the herds, forcing them to prey on humans. Faith notes that the Ute people have experience fighting the Burrowers and their poison. After another encounter, during which Parcher fires Callaghan’s leg accidentally, two Ute seize a paralyzed Parcher and take him away. They leave behind a necklace made from previous Burrower victims, with a brooch that Coffey had given Maryanne.
Realizing Maryanne is gone and the Ute have the key to stopping the toxin, Coffey vows to track down the Ute and uncover a cure. He shoots one of the Ute and learns that the other has bound Parcher to a tree as bait. Parcher injures the other Ute, but Coffey’s leg is caught in a bear trap, and he is forced to watch as the Burrowers surface and devour Parcher alive. When Coffey frees himself, he sees that the Burrowers he subdued are paralyzed by the toxin, and the rising sun proves fatal to them.
With the injured Ute in tow, Coffey returns to Faith and Callaghan, hoping to secure medical help. Instead, he crosses paths with Victor’s military convoy, and upon his return to camp, he finds Faith and the Ute hanged and Callaghan dead after his amputated leg. Victor blames the Native people and vows revenge. In the final, grim moment, the Burrowers begin to feast on a still-living Spacks, leaving Coffey to face a brutal reckoning and a mystery that no longer contains easy answers.
A stark tale of survival, mistrust, and interwoven loyalties, the narrative follows a disparate band of travelers as they confront a predator that preys on fear and flesh, and it question whether any ally can be trusted when every turn reveals a more chilling truth.
