JONAH, an unemployed gambler, takes his estranged pot-smoking teenaged daughter AURORA on a dangerous road trip to Churchill, Manitoba to show her the magnificent Northern Lights - before her vision disorder renders her completely blind. With a volatile bookie in hot pursuit, Jonah and Aurora are forced to finally confront each other, and their complicated pasts.

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.