George, Jake Weber, is a highly-strung professional photographer at a Manhattan advertising agency, already teetering on the edge of burnout from the relentless pace of his work. In search of a quiet break, he and his wife Kim, Patricia Clarkson, along with their 10-year-old son Miles set off for Upstate New York to take in the wintery scenery and reconnect away from the city’s pressures. The journey itself feels uneasy, as though the snow and silence outside mirror the tension buzzing beneath the surface of their family dynamic.
When a deer bolts onto the icy road, George swerves and accidentally injures it. He pauses to assess the damage, only to collide with Otis, a local hunter whose temper flares with a fierce pride. A heated confrontation erupts, leaving George shaken and unsettled by the intensity of Otis’s anger and the sense that the woods themselves might be listening. The family finally reaches their cabin, but the house feels different once they step inside—darkness seems to have moved in with them, wrapping the place in a cold, quiet threat.
The next morning, Miles ventures into town with the weight of what he’s heard about the woods weighing on him. At a small shop, the shopkeeper recounts the legend of the Wendigo, a shape-shifting monster from Native American folklore said to emerge after cannibalism and to wield supernatural powers that allow it to alter its form at will. The shopkeeper also gives Miles a small figurine of a Wendigo, a token that seems to him to have a possible connection to the strange happenings surrounding the cabin. The tale sits heavy in Miles’s mind as he and his parents carry on with their day.
Back at the cabins, a playful sledding session takes a dark turn when George suddenly collapses. The woods close in on Miles as he runs to his father’s side while being chased by the very fear the Wendigo legend embodies. He faints, and Kim, alarmed by their failure to return, eventually finds Miles and rushes him back to safety. The family’s sense of safety has fractured; the once-cozy retreat now feels haunted by a presence that may be more than just fear.
Kim and Miles decide to press deeper into the forest to reach help and end up back at their cabin, where they discover a horrifying scene: a bloodied George crawls toward the car, claiming that Otis shot him. Panicked and desperate, Kim and Miles hurry George into the car and drive toward the nearest hospital. In a twist of truth that shocks them all, it becomes clear that the shooting occurred earlier near a shooting range, when Otis fired a liver wound at George with a hunting rifle.
George’s condition deteriorates quickly, and he undergoes emergency surgery. Miles, waiting in the hospital, experiences a haunting vision in which the Wendigo seems to assault his father, a vision that overwhelms him and makes him faint once more. When he regains consciousness, he faces the devastating reality: George has died.
Otis’s fate intersects with law and justice in a brutal, relentless arc. He is confronted by the local sheriff, but Otis kills the sheriff and drives off into the night, pursued by the Wendigo in the shadows of the forest. His escape ends abruptly when he crashes into a tree and, badly injured, stumbles into the road where a deputy sheriff’s squad car hits him. The film closes with Otis being wheeled into the emergency room of the hospital, followed by the Indian shopkeeper who had warned of the Wendigo, while Miles, still holding the Wendigo figurine, watches it all unfold and seeks some sense of meaning in the night’s horrors.
