On the night suburban Atlanta fills with things that freeze in place, hunt by sound, and speak in the voices of the people you have lost, a twenty-year-old caretaker drives across the city with five friends to pull his eleven-year-old sister out of a sleepover, learning as he goes that the things cannot come through a door on their own and that every one of them is working to make somebody open it.

SYNOPSIS:

Owen is twenty, keeps a clean room, and is hosting a forty-eight hour LAN party in his parents' basement while they are away in Charleston. His eleven-year-old sister Maya goes off to a sleepover at Sophia's house with a packed bag and a full battery. Five friends are downstairs: Devon, loud and ranked and quietly generous, Casey the pre-med, Jess who works and loses first on purpose, Tyler streaming to eleven people, and Sam who never plays offense.

The pizza never arrives. The restaurant does not pick up. The internet fills with a hashtag telling people not to open their doors, and then the doorbell rings upstairs and a voice that belongs to Owen's father asks to be let in. His father's phone rings behind the front door when Owen calls it. The thing on the porch is patient, it loops when it runs out of words, and it has been listening to them talk for an hour.

They work out the rule from a doorbell video: the Mimics do not cross a threshold on their own. Somebody has to hand them that. Then Maya calls. She is in a closet upstairs at Sophia's, twelve percent battery, and Sophia's mother is downstairs saying her name in the dark. Owen tells the room he is going and that nobody owes him the ride. All five get in the car.

They lose Devon at the side gate before they reach the driveway, and it is Owen going back for him that puts him three feet away when it happens. Casey learns the kill on the same lawn, base of the skull, and passes the rule to everyone in the car. Owen breaks the noise rule at an intersection for a kid with a stuffed bear and turns the whole block. They leave a man at a strip mall because his eyes track clean but his arm has a bite on it, and Owen promises to find his daughter. Two officers have staged a roadblock with a pink backpack in the road, and that is when the group understands the things have stopped waiting and started building reasons to open. Tyler calls his mother, hears her loop his name, and later opens his own door for a child crying in a yard where no child is.

They reach Sophia's house and go in through the sliding door. Owen gets Maya out of the closet by holding still in front of the slats and letting her watch his eyes track. On the way out a man with reading glasses steps into the hall and reaches for her, and Casey puts the knife in Owen's hand instead of using it. Casey has already been scratched in the laundry room and said nothing, because saying it would have cost them Maya. Sam gets a leg in the car and then a hand from the lawn next door, and Sam plants their feet and tells them to go.

Casey shows the cut on the rural road at the edge of the city, says goodbye to Maya through the window, and walks off into the trees. Jess drives east with Owen holding his sister. The phone on the dash says MOM. He lets it ring out, and then the texts come, and the last one asks him to open the door and let her in. He throws the phone out the window. The car keeps going toward the light.