New York City novelist Lauren Cochran, Robin Groves, struggles with agoraphobia, and in an attempt to confront it she rents a grand Victorian mansion in upstate New York from physicist Daniel Griffith, Michael David Lally, and his ailing grandfather, Colonel Lebrun, John Carradine. A string of strange occurrences begins the moment she moves in, turning the once quiet residence into a place of unsettling echoes and whispered rumors. Lauren's nerves fray as she experiences bizarre dreams of women lounging around the house, and she is struck by a creeping feeling that the home is not new to her at all. She also discovers that an illustration of the mansion appears in her own manuscript, The Nesting, as if the house has been waiting for her to tell its story.
One day, while exploring the turret at the peak of the house, Lauren becomes trapped outside on the window ledge and has a vision of a woman inside. Her psychiatrist, Dr. Webber, arrives to help and is killed during the frantic attempt to save her, a blow that deepens Lauren’s sense of danger and inevitability. The house seems to push back with visible and invisible forces, and the line between memory and nightmare blurs in dangerous ways.
Days later, Lauren is assaulted by Frank Beasley, a handyman who has a troubling presence about him. During the struggle, he begins to levitate and flees in terror; his escape is marked by a shocking vision of two women’s corpses lying in his truck, and he later drowns in a pond under ghostly fingers. The supernatural thread tightens as Lauren seeks answers from the town’s quiet, troubled corners.
To learn more about the house’s history, Lauren visits Abner Welles, a local drunk with a notorious reputation. Abner becomes erratic and violent when questioned about the mansion, and the two exchange a tense ride in his car that ends in a chaotic crash. Lauren hides in a barn to escape him, but Abner tracks her down and, in a moment of surreal violence, is torn from his own hands by an unseen force. He is killed when Lauren uses a scythe to defend herself, and the moment leaves her shaken and more certain that the house is haunted by something long buried.
As the visions intensify, Lauren begins to experience precognitive dreams that hint at terrible events to come. Colonel Lebrun reveals to Daniel that the home was a former brothel during World War II, a place where Frank and Abner murdered several prostitutes and soldiers and disposed of their bodies in a nearby pond. The revelation casts a chilling light on the house’s past and its current hauntings, tying the present danger to historical crimes.
In a powerful hallucination, Lauren encounters Florinda, Gloria Grahame, the madame of the brothel, and learns that she is Florinda’s granddaughter and, as an infant, the lone survivor of the murders. The truth of the family bloodline and the house’s violent memory sits heavy on her shoulders. The film culminates in a fevered sequence where her manuscript seems to burn, and she witnesses Frank’s truck crash into the house and catch fire. When the visions finally recede, she staggers out of the burning mansion at dawn, carrying with her the weight of the truth the nest had kept hidden for so long.
