The Reason: Synopsis

 

Sixteen year old Emma is convinced that the storm that destroyed her home and family was the will of God; punishment for the evil her father has perpetrated on his wife and Emma’s older sister, Ruth. When members of her father’s bible-thumping congregation try to take her in, she flees and following clues from her deceased mother, arrives, unannounced, at the suburban home of her late father’s twin brother Art and his recently acquired wealthy country-club wife, Kathleen.

 

Emma, showing no grief from her loss, quickly settles into a new life style, developing a close relationship with her aunt who cleverly masks her anxiety over her own daughter’s disappearance a year prior by remaining silent about it and mothering Emma as her own. But Emma senses something evil about Art and can’t quite put her finger on it since he’s never around, having taken a second residence in the city to avoid the supposed hassles of a daily commute.

 

His home away from home provides a convenient ruse for his devious behavior. Art has a penchant for young girls and is very remorseful over the death of his latest capture, Kathleen’s missing teenaged daughter, Sara, whom he’s held captive in a private, dingy apartment for nearly a year.  Her burial is simple, like those before her, a double sealed, biologically safe, WMD body bag, carefully stacked atop four others in his closet.

 

A chance meeting between Emma and another sixteen year old girl, Madison, alerts her to the fact that she once had a cousin, Sara, who disappeared the prior year. A runaway, they say. Not wanting to bring a resurgence of bad memories to her aunt, Emma decides to get answers about her cousin by making a surprise visit to her uncle in the city, only to learn he job shares, it’s his week off, he’s nowhere to be found and according to the man he jobs shares with, Art has a different life than that of the uncle she has come to know.

 

Naively convinced Art’s cheating on Kathleen, and recalling her own father’s evil sexual exploits, Emma devises a plan with Madison to locate and confront the other woman. The trail leads them to discover the other woman is actually Art’s former wife, whose daughter also mysteriously disappeared during their brief marriage. As they further uncover Art’s dark side, their plan backfires, the girls get separated and Art captures Madison as his next victim. The police become involved, but with nothing more than a teenager’s word, Emma only has Kathleen to rely on for help. Clever sleuthing leads them to an apartment where a disillusioned Art desperately tries to protect his secrets and the closet graveyard. A violent confrontation occurs. Emma realizes she must be more than the passive beneficiary of her mother's sacrifice and her God's righteous anger. She NEEDS to symbolically kill her father by killing her equally evil uncle.

 

Months later, Emma and Madison reunite, but Emma has adopted many of the peculiar behaviors of her father and her uncle and Madison’s fate is at stake.