Synopsis/Details
English couple Max and Sarah arrive on the Abruzzo coast and take a villa.
They swim, walk, eat by candlelight, but something is missing. There’s a strained silence. They sleep in the same bed, but lie awake in their own worlds.
They stop at a charming bar and meet the ex-pat owner Vic.
Sarah photographs beggars outside the bar, but they turn aggressive. Vic warns them off and tells her they were caught in an earthquake last year. He says whole villages in the mountains were forcibly evacuated and that the people there lost everything.
Sarah and asks Vic to show them one of the villages so she can photograph it.
The next day Vic drives them inland to the abandoned hilltop town of Montepagano – Mount Pagan.
They split up and wander the ruins.
Sarah visits an abandoned church and accidentally desecrates the graves of a wife and child there that died in the quake.
She’s attacked by the grief-stricken husband and father of the dead, Massimo, who still lives amongst the ruins.
Vic chases Massimo off, but not before he cuts Sarah’s hand.
That night, Vic cleans and dresses the wound and tells Sarah to go to hospital the next day.
That night Sarah has a nightmare flashback, where she finds her son Robert in the garden at home, after he’s been attacked by the family dog.
Sarah wakes, cradling her throbbing cut hand.
After going to hospital for a stitches and a shot, Sarah meets Vic and confides in him that her relationship with Max has soured.
Vic jokes that if he were 20 years younger that would be dangerous, as despite the age difference, there’s an obvious mutual attraction.
That night in the bar, Sarah has a maddening itch and takes the bandage off her hand to find that though it’s healing, there’s a large birthmark there. Like a dark port wine stain.
But Vic and Max can’t see it.
Sarah dreams of her son’s death again that night, but also experiences rumbling vibrations, as earthquake tremors shake both her dream and the bedroom.
Max doesn’t experience any of this, and thinks she’s still suffering from the guilt and grief they came here to escape.
Sarah starts making drawings of a spidery, inky shadow.
A dog.
She tells Max it’s coming for her.
Max and Vic resolve to find Massimo and show Sarah they’re all making amends with him, for the sake of Sarah’s sanity.
Sarah, Max and Vic drive back to Mount Pagan to look for Massimo, but have no luck finding him.
Sarah experiences hallucinations in an abandoned school there, when tremors shake the building and a shape reminiscent of the mark on her hand appears on a blackboard.
The three travel on to a housing project where the former residents of Mount Pagan were sent after the earthquake. Vic shows the locals a sketch of Massimo and is pointed towards another small town in the interior where they claim he has relatives.
They drive to the next town to find it in the midst of an ancient and bizarre snake festival.
After talking to the locals there, an old woman claims to see the mark on Sarah’s hand.
It terrifies her.
Another local translates her words as “You must pay the mountain.”
Sarah presses the old woman for more information, but this angers the locals, who turn on her.
Vic comes to her aid and helps her and Max escape.
That night they stay in a pensione in the hills. They eat and drink and resolve to return to Mount Pagan the next day. Before the fight, the locals told Vic that Massimo is mad with grief and would never leave Mount Pagan under any circumstances, so he must still be hiding there.
Sarah drinks heavily and makes Max admit that he believes her story about the mark on her hand after he saw the old woman’s reaction.
Vic tells them that paranoia and superstition are infectious in this part of the country.
Sarah gets angry at his scepticism. She plays Vic and Max off against each other, before storming away.
Max confronts Vic about his feelings for Sarah. He tells him he knows nothing about her, or what they’ve been through as parents.
Max tells Vic that Sarah initially felt guilt over Robert’s death, as she locked him outside in the garden with the dog, so that she could talk to her lover in private, but as time went on, she went into denial and rewrote the narrative in her head to blame her husband for the accident instead.
Back in her room, Sarah feels tremors again, as her hand throbs, and the mirror in front of her hums, as if something is trying to break through to our world, to get to her.
She imagines a large, dark shape moving behind her reflection in the mirror, and is convinced it’s close to taking her.
Feeling fragile and scared, Sarah makes love with Max that night for the first time since Robert’s death.
Vic listens to them and realises he is just a passing figure in Sarah’s life.
Sarah, Max and Vic return to Mount Pagan the next day and search the eerie ruins for Massimo again.
After splitting up to cover more ground, Max sees a figure disappearing down an alleyway.
Max chases the figure through a maze of crumbled buildings.
He eventually finds himself trapped in a dead end.
The figure is indeed Massimo, and he is indeed insane.
Massimo stabs Max and leaves him to bleed out.
Sarah is caught in the belly of a crater by a pack of stray, wild dogs that roam the town.
Vic reaches her, as they corner her.
He manages to distract the dogs so that she can escape.
Sarah instinctively returns to the graves of Massimo’s wife and child next to the ruined church.
Massimo is there and comes out hiding to confront her.
Sarah tries to apologise to him.
She begs him to call off the thing that she believes is coming for her.
Massimo just tells her that she must pay the mountain.
Sarah stabs Massimo with his own knife, believing that his blood will be payment enough, but he just laughs as he ebbs away.
She feels the tremors rising again, hears the same hum as before, and sees the same mark on her hand begin to appear on the wall of the ruined church before her.
The wall appears to liquefy.
Something large and dark begins to emerge from its viscous surface.
Convinced that the beast, the dog, is coming for her, she backs away.
Sarah finally kills herself, rather than face it.
Vic sees her from afar, but sees no sign of the beast.
He hurries over to help, but he is too late to save her.
We float away from Mount Pagan, as the sun sets and Vic digs fresh graves for Massimo, Max and Sarah.
