At an elite New England university built on the site of a Salem-era gallows hill, two black women strive to find their place. Navigating politics and privilege, they encounter increasingly terrifying manifestations of the school's haunted past… and present.

In the steamed climate of the Great Recession and a cataclysmic oil spill, a lowly bartender loses his job at a Maryland crab shack the same day his home is foreclosed. Pushed to the brink, he pulls a gun from under the bar and takes aim at his boss. That's when a chain of good deeds, unwittingly begun by the gunman himself, brings the film to an epiphanic conclusion.