In rural Wilmington, North Carolina, Linda Henry, Theresa Russell, leads a solitary and unfulfilled life with her husband Henry Henry, Christopher Lloyd, a doctor who spends most of his free time tinkering with model trains. At his clinic, Henry carries on an affair with Nurse Stein, Sandra Bernhard. The film begins with a quiet, almost claustrophobic sense of routine that slowly frays as unseen tensions begin to surface.
A chance encounter at a cafe with Martin, Gary Oldman, a British hitchhiker born in North Carolina but raised in England, unsettles Linda. Martin has arrived in the United States in search of his birthmother, and he advances a startling claim: he is Linda’s biological son, a child she gave up for adoption years earlier. He details the woman who raised him—a British housekeeper who once lived with Linda’s family—and says she accompanied him back to England after his birth. His arrival ignites a troubling doubt in Linda about what is real and what might be memory projecting itself onto the present.
Martin’s behavior gradually shifts from curious to increasingly childlike, with moments that hint at an almost desperate longing for maternal connection. Linda responds with a complex, protective maternal stance, even as she questions the truth of Martin’s assertions. The two share a dinner at a local bar, where a waiter notices Linda crying and talking to herself, deepening the sense that Linda is navigating a fragile, shifting reality. Linda recounts the traumatic past that haunts her—her rape at a carnival, her pregnancy, and the subsequent placing of her newborn for adoption—details that begin to braid with Martin’s enigmatic presence.
Back at home, the tension intensifies in vivid, unsettling ways. Linda experiences a disturbing vision of a semi-truck crashing through her bedroom as Martin destroys Henry’s meticulously arranged model train set. Martin then sings and plays a piano piece for Linda, a moment that moves her to tears and blurs the line between comfort and manipulation. After Martin leaves, Linda reaches out to Arlanda, Colleen Camp, her friend who seems detached from the intensity of Linda’s revelations.
In the hours that follow, Linda’s memory and perception continue to unravel as she recounts the details of her rape, her pregnancy, and the decision to place her baby for adoption. Henry returns home with Nurse Stein for what appears to be a mundane, even procedural night, but the domestic atmosphere grows combustible. Arlanda goes to fetch Linda a drink, and a violent outburst from Henry erupts, which Arlanda interrupts. Linda, in a dissociated state, envisions Martin stabbing Henry to death upstairs among the model trains—a moment that crystallizes the film’s mounting dread.
The next morning, Linda dresses in an elegant gown and leaves the house, choosing to ignore Henry’s calls as she drives away. The evidence of a tragedy lingers in plain sight: a pool of blood beneath the upstairs floor, and drops of it dripping from the living room ceiling, hinting at a murder that has forever altered the home’s quiet façade. The film closes on this haunting tableau, leaving the viewer with a poignant, unsettling meditation on memory, reality, and the cost of secrets kept within a marriage.
