| Director | Brandon Cronenberg |
|---|---|
| Runtime | 117 min |
| Country | Canada, France, Hungary |
| Budget | $4.5 million |
| Box office | $5.2 million |
Novelist James Foster and his wife Em spend time at a resort in the fictional seaside country of Li Tolqa, where a local festival is underway. The couple's implied marital strife is exacerbated when Gabi, a fan of James' only published novel, invites them to spend time with her and her husband Alban. The four have dinner and spend the next day driving in the countryside, even though they have been warned that tourists are to remain on the resort grounds at all times.
At a beach, as James urinates behind a tree, Gabi unexpectedly grabs him from behind and gives him a hand job. After a long day of sunbathing and cooking, the four drunkenly drive back to their hotel. En route, the lights of the car begin to flicker, and James accidentally hits a local man, killing him. Gabi insists that they cannot call the police as the country is corrupt and they will not be safe.
The next day, James is arrested. The penalty for his crime is death at the hand of his victim's firstborn son. However, due to diplomatic agreement, the country has a unique system of justice reserved for foreign nationals. The guilty, for a hefty fee, can be copied and have their duplicates killed in their place. These "doubles" to be executed are exact copies of the original, down to the memories of having committed the crime. James pays the fee to escape execution.
James' clone, tied to a stake, pleads with Em to save him as the victim's teenage son executes him with a large dagger. While Em is horrified and wants to leave immediately, James is titillated by the spectacle. He tells Em that his passport (which he hid) is missing and encourages her to return to the United States alone.
James extends his stay by a week and encounters Gabi and Alban again. They introduce him to a small group of Western tourists who all have been convicted of serious crimes and have paid to watch their doubles killed. One of the group asks James whether he can be certain that he is the original version of himself or the double, since he became unconscious during the process and only came round in bed later.
The group mounts a robbery in the home of the resort owner which turns into a shootout. The next day, the whole group watches their clones' group execution. Em leaves the country in disgust, finding James intolerable. Over the next several days, the group encourages James to transform into a libertine criminal, encouraging him to kill locals, engage in intoxicated orgies (he uses a local hallucinogen with Gabi, so it is unclear how much of the orgy is real), and abuse other resort guests.
One night James is tricked into brutalizing a clone of himself he had been led to believe was the detective who initially arrested him, but which the group had paid the detective to provide. In a moment of clarity and panic, James retrieves his passport and attempts to flee. However, the tourist group abducts him from the bus transporting him to the airport. Gabi reveals that she finds him pathetic, that she never read his book, and that he was targeted by the group, which is abusing him for their own amusement. The accident James and Em had with Gabi and Alban made their plan easier to implement, but if not for the accident, they would have found a way to get him in trouble. James runs off into a nearby wilderness, but Gabi shoots him in the leg.
After hours of wandering, James collapses at a farm, where a local family takes him in to recuperate. In his drugged state, he experiences another series of hallucinations involving the son of the man he struck and killed with the car strangling him. Once he has regained his strength, he is again confronted by Gabi's group, who order him to ritualistically kill a leashed duplicate of himself they refer to as "the dog" to complete his transformation into a murdering tourist. He refuses, but when the clone attempts to kill him, James beats him to death. Gabi consoles James by exposing her bare breast, covering it with the warm blood of "the dog" and inviting him to simulate breastfeeding.
The next day, as they head back to the United States, the other tourists casually chat about minutiae of their lives at home and work while James is silent and visibly traumatized, although he appeared to have reconciled with Em over the phone prior to leaving the hotel. They invite him to rejoin them next year—they return to the resort annually to commit crimes and pay to watch their doubles get slaughtered. Sitting at the gate at the airport, James intentionally misses his flight. He returns to the closed resort, where the rainy season has begun. He sits alone in the downpour of the monsoon.