Unearth 2020

In rural Pennsylvania, two farming families—the Lomacks and the Dolans—are locked in a long-running feud that grows tenser as hard times press in on both sides. George Lomack, a single father running a failing auto repair shop, finds himself forced to make a desperate choice when Patriot Exploration offers money in exchange for drilling rights on his land. Across the way, Kathryn Dolan and Tom Dolan, the stern matriarch and weary patriarch, head a household that includes their daughters, Aubrey Dolan and Christina Dolan, who watch the Lomacks with wary eyes. The Lomack family is rounded out by the girls’ cousins, Heather Lomack and Kim Lomack, with Kim’s infant son Reese adding a fragile thread of hope to the landscape of resentment and survival.

Patriot Exploration moves in with heavy equipment and a rapid schedule, pressing onto the Lomack property and shattering the already fragile balance between the two families. As machines churn, a creeping dread settles over the land and the surrounding woods. Soon, strange, escalating symptoms begin to surface among both households: residents become obsessed with scratching their skin, and the air around the homes grows unnaturally still, with wildlife sounds strangely absent.

The illness is tied to something far more unsettling than ordinary sickness. A fungus unearthed by the fracking seeps into the air and water, poisoning the environment and bending perception. The younger generation, especially Reese, senses the danger in the water—Reese instinctively refuses to drink from the taps—while the adults struggle to maintain a grip on reality as the infection tightens its hold.

The crisis intensifies as the violence of the disease reveals itself in the most brutal ways. Kathryn goes missing after a coughing fit in the barn, and later is found kneeling at a tree, tethered to it by fungal tendrils sprouting from her body. A sac on one of the tendrils erupts, drenching Tom Dolan in a sinister substance that marks the transformation tearing through the families. In the meantime, Kim discovers Reese dead in his crib, his body liquefied into a gelatinous mass by the fungus’s digestion of his skin. The contagion’s grip twists loyalties, as Aubrey Dolan shoots Kim under the influence of the infection, and Heather Lomack retaliates by killing Aubrey with a baseball bat.

George from the Lomacks drives Kim to a neighbor’s house for help, while Heather remains behind to look after the rest of the Lomack family. In a haze of fear and hallucination, George assaults the neighbor, seemingly killing him as he misreads his own reflection in his frayed mental state. The tension crescendos when Christina and Heather confront Tom in the Lomacks’ kitchen; Christina, believing she bears the same tendrils as Kathryn, shoots Tom Dolan. Heather and Christina flee to the tree house in the woods and, after a tense sequence, Christina wanders through the fields with a rifle, firing into the empty woods before driving the truck into the corn and slipping into unconsciousness as the sounds of wildlife briefly return, hinting that the danger may have ebbed for the moment.

In the aftermath, Christina appears to have taken the farm’s reins, a development Kathryn had hoped for. But the infection lingers in the scratches on Christina’s arm, suggesting that the fungus still holds a foothold in her. As the credits roll, the corn from the farm heads to a bayside city, while the drainage from the property seems to flow toward the ocean, leaving the fate of the land—and its people—unclear, haunted by what remains unseen beneath the soil.