On January 18, 2003, police, alerted by a frantic 911 call from a distraught pair of teenage girls, arrived at the girls Toronto area town house to find their mother dead. It appeared the 44-year-old alcoholic, having slipped into a booze-and-pill stupor, drowned in her own bathwater. The death was ruled accidental by the authorities. In the months that followed, however, police were alerted to rumours and reports that the teenagers had been gossiping to friends about the accident. Police began piecing together rumours that suggested the teens might have had a hand in their mother's death. In fact, rather than an accident, the story that emerged portrayed the two teens as cold-blooded, premeditated killers.

While traveling to Rockwell Falls in an assignment of the US Census Bureau, the surveyor from Chicago Steve Kady has two flat tires nearby the small town. The local Deputy Bobby Caine brings him to the town and the Mayor Grateman lodges him in a farm, where the gorgeous Courtney Lovett lives with her mother. Steve finds that Rockwell Falls, considered by the locals as the most perfect place on Earth, has the same population since 1860 and sooner he discloses the meaning and the dark secret of their creed of solidarity and steadfastness.

Beneath the facade, is fear. Beneath the smile, is shame. Beneath the ground... is death. Environmental activist Father Douglas Middleton (Kevin Sorbo, as a most unusual priest) must stop a primeval beast preying on his eco-conference colleagues -- or fall victim to it himself.