A schizophrenic filmmaker, traumatized since childhood by the murder of his mother, writes and plots a retelling of his past staring a naive teenage girl and her friends while a creepy old man haunts them in the woods.

A woman’s return to her family home prompts her to film an old friend’s wedding.

It’s not easy being a teenager and Mike, a sixteen-year-old, has it espcially hard. He lives in the sticks with his mother, a non-stop nagger, in Faintville, a Canadian timber industry town. He has no father, no friends, not even a favorite meal. Basically, his sole wish is simply to vanish from the face of the earth. One day, Mike writes his own obituary and shoots himself. To his great disappointment he wakes up the in the local hospital. During a routine examination, the doctors discover a plum-sized tumor in his brain. Mike can scarcely believe his luck and keeps the illness to himself to avoid undergoing surgery that would save him. Staring death directly in the eyes, however, changes Mike’s point of view and he re-evaluates his opinion of both enchanting and crazy Miranda. Somebody seems to understand him after all.

Larry, a 16-year-old Tlicho Indian, lives in the small northern town of Fort Simmer. He loves heavy metal music and has a crush on his classmate, the high school’s hottie, Juliet Hope. Larry’s past holds a variety of terrors—his father is abusive and he once had an accident that nearly killed him. When Johnny Beck , a young Métis from Hay River, moves to town, things heat up.