Plot summary

We see the main actress, Sarah (Nicole Brydon Bloom) exit her slightly rusted blue car and walk up to an apartment building with a vacancy sign. She goes in and initially helps an older lady (Esther, Earnestine Phillips) not fall in the courtyard and has a look of calmness on her face. She turns the corner onto the 2nd floor apartment building to look at the unit available and to her dismay the apartment is full of other people who came before her. As she turns to leave, a man Jerry (Taylor Nichols) tells her "it's not first come first serve". As she walks around the room she notices that there are 2 imprints in the wall that have been caulked and painted over. She runs her fingers over those raised bumps in the wall as she hears "it's a smoke free and pet free apartment building". Sarah is seen with Gus filling out an application and says 'No I don't have a pet" when asked about the pet clause.She drives away and pulls into a motel. There she is seen sitting in a dimly lit room on the bed with a laptop in front of her. An orange tabby springs up onto her lap as she continues to browse online. She gets a phone call and looks at the phone reluctantly before she picks it up. It's her father (Guz, Alan Blumenfeld). He asks her if she is really doing this. Coming out to LA on her own and tossing school and her costume design dreams away. Sarah defiantly says no and mentions that she is going to sign up for extension courses. She already has found a job. Her step-mother comes into the frame and the phone call ends.We cut to Sarah at a desk job. It's an attorney office and she is some data entry person with a co-worker named Lisa (Celeste Sully), a sympathetic colleague at Sarah's generically taxing and underpaid temp job. We see Lisa get into a fight with one of the legal professionals about labeling certain pages and Lisa stands up to the other woman. Sarah peers on the dispute and is called out by Lisa after the other woman leaves. Sarah becomes flustered during the confrontation and Lisa reveals she's just teasing her. Lisa promises to show Sarah around the office when she returns from her call-back.Sarah gets a call from the apartment complex saying that she got the position. Sarah is next seen with a large crate under a blue blanket moving up into the second floor. She crate meows as she encounters the handsome boy (Brian (Giles Matthey)) she met earlier. Brian introduces himself as her neighbor and offers to help her move her items in. Sarah says she's got it and the scene cuts to her inside of the apartment.As they settle in over the coming days, Sarah keeps hearing weird noises during the night and assumes it's the pipes. But then she starts getting notices from the apartment building that pets are strictly forbidden. She ignores the first note, but then another quickly flashes under her door with "selfish bitch" written on it. She quickly opens the door and finds no one in the immediate hallway. She sees creepy, one-eyed Lester in the hallway across from her. Brian invites Sarah to a dinner party and she reluctantly agrees. Later however, we see Sarah coming with take-out with her co-worker, Lisa. Lisa and Sarah talk on the couch and Lisa supportively states that Sarah should continue to pursue her costume designer dream. Later that night Sarah's smoke detector goes off and smoke is coming out of the oven rapidly. Her cat got stuffed in the oven. Brian later ties her up to a wooden Ikea chair and gets out his toolbox of torture devices. But Sarah breaks the chair apart and makes a dash toward s the door.While trying to escape, she meets one of the other residents, Esther (Earnestine Phillips), and begs Esther to help her. Brian reassures the Esther that everything is under control and Esther says, better be. Sarah now realizes that the all other residents are in on the capture. Brian and Esther subdue her and knock her out. When she wakes up, she's in a boarded-up room wearing scrubs. Brian and Jerry come in and tell her she has to learn to cooperate. They make her stand with her hands against the wall in what they call a "stress position." As long as the lights are on, she has to stay in that position, and if she falls, she's punished. They go through this routine for days. During the torture, Lester is brought in and shown what happens to people who resist (ear ripped up) and when they try to escape (his eye was taken out). Sarah complies for another few days until she can't do it anymore. She is given an ultimatum, either hands on the wall or a bullet through her head. So they nail her hands to the wall. She eventually rips them off and sits in the corner. When the light turns on another time, Sarah is sitting in the corner and slowly gets up to put her hands on the bloody wall. At that moment Brian and Jerry come in, saying that she's passed the first part of the test to become a member of the community.For the following months, Sarah is incorporated into the community. She reads the doctrine that the community is based on and sees how the community runs. There is footage of her pacing back and forth around the room completely engrossed in the book. She quickly finds out that once you come into Asilo del Mar, you never get to leave. When Jerry decides she's ready to be an official member of the community, Sarah is branded behind her ear and given to Lester (Clayton Hoff), a man in the community who recently lost his wife to cancer. Sarah will be her replacement.Of course, Sarah won't just settle in. Not only does her dad come to try to talk some sense into her, but eventually, one of Sarah's old friends and coworkers, Lisa (Celeste Sully), applies to live in the apartment. She's chosen and put through the same rigorous testing and torture, but she can't handle it. She is too stubborn and won't cooperate. Jerry tries to force Sarah to lobotomize her, but instead, Sarah stabs Jerry. He kills Lisa, so Sarah kills Jerry. She takes off to try to escape the community, only to be stopped at the door by everyone. She is halfway through the door. She has her shoulder and arm outside, but the group pulls her in. She fires her gun and make them back off. Eventually Lester gets a hold of the gun. Sarah pleads to him to remember what it was like when he wanted to escape. He could escape too. In a moment's eye, Lester shoots the man holding Sarah, allowing her to escape through the door. We see Lester turn the gun towards his chin as the door closes and blood splatters on the frosted window. Sarah has escaped.As she's running down the street covered in blood, she realizes the entire street has CBE company as the real estate owner. She realizes that the whole street is owned by the same CBE company, CBE being the creator of the original doctrine. Sarah slows down in-front of another complex right as she notices a dome shaped camera on the outside of the complex. An alarm goes off and it flashes bright red, alerting an escape. Sarah turns and runs down the street as the siren blares in the distance.