When Harold Guppy [Rupert Graves] visits a English coastal village in search of his long lost brother, he takes a room with the Beasley family. Mrs. Beasley [Julie Walters] appears to run a very proper and respectable household, but before long her new lodger finds himself in her bed. To complicate matters, Mrs. Beasley’s precocious thirteen year old daughter Joyce also takes a shine to Harold, and begins to demand that she receives a share of his attentions as well. Trapped in the middle of an increasingly strange ménage-a-trois, Harold becomes more and more desperate to escape, until one summer’s day the situation reaches a violent and shocking dénouement.