Will Atenton (Daniel Craig), a successful editor for a New York City publishing, quits his job to focus on writing a book while spending more time with his wife Libby (Rachel Weisz) and their young daughters, Trish and Dee Dee. The family is initially happy to live in their upstate New York "dream house" near the forest. Soon, however, they start to grew uneasy due to a series of unsettling events, including their daughters seeing a strange man lurking outside and teenagers gathering in the basement. It all seems to tie to a crime committed in the house five years earlier, when a man named Peter Ward apparently murdered his wife and two kids, was committed to a mental hospital from which he has been recently released due to lack of evidence.