On the surface, everything seems the same in the seaside town of Monterey, CA: mothers continue to dote, husbands support, children are adorable, houses are beautiful. But the night of the school fundraiser changed all that. Meanwhile, Perry's grieving mother Mary Louise Wright comes to town in search of answers after her son's death.

A lurid tale of sex and psychosis is among the wildest of the Gainsborough melodramas. Set in Italy, it begins as a comparatively sedate tale about a respectable, convent-raised woman who is haunted by the memory of being raped as a teenager. But when her grown daughter returns from school, her life begins to unravel in monumentally surprising ways.