In 2011, Eunju Oh opens her door to greet a young Korean American woman holding a familiar-looking knife - a knife Eunju hasn't seen in thirty years and that connects her to a place she'd hoped to leave behind. In South Korea in the 1980s, young Eunju and her mother are homeless. They're sent to live in a state-sanctioned reformatory center that claims to rehabilitate the nation's citizens but hides a more violent reality. While Eunju and her mother form a tight-knit community with the other women, two brothers, Sangchul and Youngchul, make increasingly desperate decisions - and all are forced down a path of survival, the repercussions of which will echo for decades.