Son

Laura is a single mother raising her young son David in a small Mississippi town, living quietly under an assumed identity after escaping a satanic cult years earlier. The cult had ritualistically impregnated her as a teenager, and she fled before they could claim the child. One night she wakes to find a circle of hooded figures gathered around David's bed; by the time she gets him to safety, the intruders have vanished and the police find no evidence anyone was there. David himself remembers nothing.

Within days David falls violently ill. He suffers seizures, vomits, refuses food, and his body begins to deteriorate in ways no doctor can identify. Laura takes him from hospital to hospital, the diagnoses dead-end, until David finally tells her what he needs: human flesh. Only that will stop the pain.

Desperate and out of options, Laura kills — first David's elementary school teacher Mrs. Tuttle, then others — feeding what she takes to her son. David recovers each time, briefly. Detective Paul Reeves, an old contact who once helped Laura disappear, picks up the trail of the killings. When he confronts her, he sees the boy and sees what's happening to him; instead of arresting her he chooses to help her stay ahead of the cult and the law both.

They go on the run together. The killings continue — more frequent, more reckless, the gap between feedings shrinking. Laura and Paul build something resembling a family in motel rooms. But the cult is closing in, leaving tokens and signs that prove they always knew where she was, that they'd been patient. David's transformations grow more pronounced; his hunger more articulate. The line between her son and the thing the cult conceived him to be is collapsing.

In the final confrontation, Laura learns what the cult always knew: David is a vessel, and every feeding has accelerated him toward something he was made to become. She has been finishing the cult's work for them. Faced with the cost of continuing, she makes a choice no mother should have to make — she ends it herself, holding David until he is still. The cult is denied. Paul finds her with the body. The film closes on a woman who has saved no one and lost everything.