When a housewife's psychotic tendencies are mirrored in the actions of her husband and children, she must find a way to keep her family together before she loses her self-control and her influence on them unravels.

SYNOPSIS:

The story begins with a flash-forward within the cement walls of a dimly-lit basement. A single, bright lamp shines on the face of a man who is unconscious, stripped naked and strapped to a steel gurney. As he comes to, he realizes in horror that he has been detained against his will. An unknown person holds him captive, brandishing a weapon, threatening him. He struggles to break free, but to no avail. He cries out - first in a rage, then in a plea for mercy. His screams go unheard as his faceless tormentor cuts into his flesh.

Back to the present. It’s breakfast time for our main characters, THE AGUILARS: DOLORES, an award-winning chef and author, who is serving up a delicious meal; her husband GERARD, a dissatisfied office worker with an unrewarding job as an IT specialist; BEATRICE, their six-year-old adopted daughter, and their adopted teenage son HUGO, who is constantly on video chat with his girlfriend ANGELINA.

Dolores has a side job as a driver for a ride-sharing service. We get a first look at her more frightening tendencies when she calmly, but totally inappropriately begins to lecture one of her passengers on various aspects of her finances and personal life. There is a brief moment where Dolores locks the car doors during this exchange, leading us to believe that when they are finally opened, the young female passenger who flees the back seat has just escaped something worse than she knows.

As the story progresses, the other members of the family are beginning to get hints of what Dolores has been up to. Beatrice accidentally witnesses her cleaning up blood, and Hugo soon finds a stray tooth in a drain near his mother’s custom cooking station. CLAUDE BERTRAM is officially introduced as Gerard’s nemesis at his job – he is the murder victim seen in the beginning of the film. We also sneak a peek at Gerard’s curious preoccupation - dominatrix porn. He even goes so far as to arrange a rendezvous with a dominatrix prostitute at a seedy motel, only to fail to follow through with it when he experiences a seemingly psychotic episode.

Hugo is experiencing strange urges, particularly an unhealthy curiosity about what the insides of human beings might look like. He has a fantasy about cutting up a dead girl during his science class. This mirrors his mother’s daydreams surrounding the prattling gossip queen JULIA SCRANTON, who invites herself and her daughter Claire over for a visit at the Aguilar home. Hugo attempts to discuss his urges with his mother, but she misunderstands and opportunity is lost. Claude discovers Gerard’s interest in dominatrix porn while at work and threatens to expose him, but Gerard frightens him out of it with a threatening outburst of his own. It’s inferred that Gerard later exposes Claude for his heavy gambling in the office, which causes him to be terminated.

We see the purpose of Dolores’s side job when she picks up a homeless drifter, and brings him back to her home, ostensibly to become part of the meal. One of the major ingredients in Dolores’s popular recipes, as she puts it, is “a little part of herself.” This turns out to be quite literal when we see her ritual of cutting her finger and bleeding into the pot, a tradition that began on accident in her culinary school days.

The family-wide propensity for violence doesn’t stop with the parents. When Angelina finds the tooth Hugo recovered from the basement in his locker, she confronts him, but he becomes angry at her for invading his privacy. She has to kick him to the ground to fight him off. While his mother is doing household chores, she finds a sinister-looking art project in his room which includes the tooth he found. Eager to hide this monstrosity from young Beatrice lest she be frightened by it, Dolores throws it away. This is when she really begins to worry about how her own activities may be influencing her children. She heads to a donation center later, with clothing from the drifter. Merulo happens to be there and spots her leaving. Meanwhile, an incident occurs when Julia and Claire visits Dolores and Beatrice. At one point, the girls go upstairs to play in Beatrice’s room, and the play date comes to a quick end when Beatrice bites Claire for touching her dollhouse. Later that same night, Julia comes back with Doug Merulo, the local county sheriff, to press charges, but after speaking with Dolores and Gerard, he decides that no real harm was done. He even decides to forego taking a statement from Beatrice.

As the details mount, we learn that the Aguilars are vampires. Dolores has been “seasoning” the family dinner with her own blood to keep them from having to go out and seek it. At home, Gerard finds a confession letter Dolores has left for him detailing previous murders she has committed, which prompts him to come clean about his own activities, including having kidnapped Claude. This exchange turns erotic for the couple and the household seems to go back to a normal routine. The peace is short lived, though, as Merulo shows up at the door with a warrant after tracking Claude’s cell phone to their home. In the final moments, when all routes seem to have closed for the family, Dolores uses vampire hypnotism to send Merulo away and back to his office, where he destroys all documented evidence that he had against the family.

Now the family is in the clear - they can relax and sit down to a nice family dinner. Finally, someone knocks at the front door. Claude’s mother, who is his only other living relative, receives and accepts an invite to come have dinner with the Aguilars. As the family welcomes her inside, we are left wondering if she may be the family’s next victim.