The first rule of Gothic fiction is: When a friend invites you to their empty house in the middle of nowhere through a missive laden with implications, don t go. Alas, Francis (Aiken) never got the memo, and so travels to the midcentury edifice that is home to his childhood friend, the pale and dissolute Jean Paul Lauret (Adler). Meanwhile sister Vivian Lauret (Basso), for whom Francis seemingly holds some less-than-platonic yearnings, has locked herself in her room, only emerging at night to awaken the house guest with enigmatic warnings, and citations from Ecclesiastes. That is, the house guest they know of or talk about. There s someone crawling out of the nearby shallow stream and hiding in the closet, for unknown but clearly sinister reasons, which may (or may) not be something to do with JP s increasingly unbalanced behavior.