Deer hunting season starts in three days, and nearly everyone in the Ozarks is preparing to gun down a big buck. But in the backwoods town of Doe Run, Missouri, wild game won't be the only target.

A desperate drifter on the run, Pen Cullen, reluctantly returns home after a thirteen-year absence for the sole reason to pick up a family inheritance, and he discovers that his no-good father had squandered it all before dying. He also surprisingly learns that his former flame, Tara Hawkins, had ended up marrying his childhood buddy, Byron Tisdale, but their relationship recently derailed after they'd tragically lost their little boy to an accidental shooting by the hands of a hot-headed farmer.

Grief-stricken Tara has since gone to religion. Byron has turned into a hallucinating drunk and maniacal recluse. And as Pen reacquaints himself with the town and these two old relations, their secret obsessions over greed, guilt, revenge, and redemption slowly ignite into a violent reckoning on the opening day of the hunt.