DUE

​​Struggling to cope with her childhood trauma, seventeen-year-old Nina Miller finds herself on the verge of death, overdosing on prescription medication. As her consciousness slips, something reaches out from the dark. Nina utters the word “deal” and miraculously survives — but not without great cost: her firstborn child. Nine years later, Nina’s birth control is sabotaged, causing her to fall pregnant from a brief but intense encounter with a charming stranger. While Nina may have forgotten her deal, she cannot escape it. Her positive pregnancy test marks the beginning of a downward spiral, with those around her behaving in increasingly disturbing ways. After Nina’s son is born, the horrors intensify, warping her sense of reality and pushing her to the brink. She seeks refuge in the last place she ever wanted to go: her childhood home, where old wounds linger and her estranged mother still fails to see the monsters right in front of her —until, finally, she does. It becomes clear to both women that an entity is stalking Nina, pretending and shapeshifting in a bid to get close to her child. Desperate, Nina attempts to destroy the entity using the same drug that nearly killed her. But the plan fails, and what follows is a harrowing face-off as the entity reveals its most hurtful and personal form yet: her father, a specter of the abuse that still haunts her. Nina manages to beat the entity at its own game, forging a new deal that it unwittingly agrees to — clearing her debt. The final moments reveal a deeper, hidden layer of the story, one that’s been quietly foreshadowed from the very beginning: the entity is none other than the ancient fable character Rumpelstiltskin.