The body of teenager Gloria Hollinger is found dead on a Los Angeles beach, and Lt. Phil Gaines is in charge of the investigation. Gaines learns that the girl, a stripper and prostitute, committed suicide, but he ignores the connection between her and a powerful mob lawyer, Leo Sellers. Hollinger’s father, however, is not satisfied with Gaines’s results, and attempts to investigate the case on his own.

Many years after a catastrophic event has decimated society, humanity is on the verge of extinction. The last few people continue on in search of life, struggling to survive as they confront their mortality and purpose in this dying world.

An entrepreneurial criminal, Slim (Dorff) is as smart as they come. Cocky and confident, he assembles a team of risk-taking rush-seekers to pull off a series of five bank heists, each time using a different extreme sport to make the getaway. Following an unexpected windfall on only their second job, the gang nets $20 million in untraceable bonds. Having scored enough money to retire on, Slim and his crew decide to call the robbery game quits. But both the mob and the police have other plans in mind for Slim: they want him to keep working, for them.

Seventeen talented Australian directors from diverse artistic disciplines each create a chapter of the hauntingly beautiful novel by multi award-winning author Tim Winton. The linking and overlapping stories explore the extraordinary turning points in ordinary people’s lives in a stunning portrait of a small coastal community. As characters face second thoughts and regret, relationships irretrievably alter, resolves are made or broken, and lives change direction forever.

Yorkshire, 1978. A mother, father and their three year old son are brutally stabbed to death while they sleep. There is no motive. They were a model family. The nation is outraged by the senseless killings. Incredibly, the British public are overwhelmingly in favour of bringing back the death penalty to see justice carried out. Even more incredibly the killer, who is caught red-handed trying to drag the father’s body out of the house, manages to hide the three year old’s body in a place where the investigators, the police and even their dog teams would never find it. For months all the nation can talk about is the “Kid Killer” but, and this is the most incredible fact of all, not because he cold-bloodedly stabbed to death a three year old, his mother and his father, but because these innocent victims were also his family. The “Kid Killer” was their twelve year old son William.

An aging cop is assigned the ordinary task of escorting a fast-talking witness from police custody to a courthouse, but they find themselves running the gauntlet as other forces try to prevent them from getting there.

Ancient Rome, during the time of Emperor Nero. Vinicius, a young patrician, falls in love with the beautiful Lygia, the daughter of a Barbarian commander who was killed in battle, and wants her for his concubine. For Lygia, a Christian, being a pagan’s concubine is a severe sin and disgrace. However, when Vinicius is wounded, Lygia cares for him, and starts to reciprocate his feelings. Vinicius, in return, becomes interested in Christian learning and asks Apostle Peter to teach him. In the meantime, Emperor Nero accuses Christians of having started a great fire in Rome. He encourages the imprisonment, torture and murder of his Christian subjects.

Angel City trooper Jack Deth is sent back in time from 2247 to 1985 L.A. to inhabit the body of his ancestor. Deth’s assignment is to find his archenemy, Whistler, who turns people into zombies, before the fiend is able to kill all the ancestors of the future’s governing council.

After a failed suicide attempt a woman is haunted by a malevolent figure.

A robber escapes from prison with a single objective in mind: to track down his former cellmate, a serial killer who intends to pin his crimes on him. A cop is sent after the robber who, despite his best efforts, soon becomes Public Enemy Number One. As the protagonists are driven to their limits, it becomes increasingly unclear who is the hunter and who is the prey.

Claude and Marie Verneuil face a new crisis. The four spouses of their daughters, David, Rachid, Chao and Charles decided to leave France for various reasons. Here they are imagining their lives elsewhere.

Sita is an escort at a karaoke bar who struggles to raise money to send her daughter out of the city to live with her grandmother and settle her debts with her pimp. She moves in with aging photographer Jan and helps him fulfill his last wishes.