Privation

Harold Pardee, a depressed, young, alcoholic, college dropout, who has come from a religiously repressive background, gets a data entry job at a small software company west of Austin, Texas, after his religious mother has refused to pay for his college any further due to his perceived "sinful" ways of partying and trying to date girls. He doesn't fit in with his new work colleagues, and Sara, who writes help desk documentation, is the one person at work who treats him kindly. Due to harassment from bigoted colleagues and his own insecurities, to prove his "manhood", he frequents a local strip club where a dancer, Shantilly, goes missing. Harold claims ignorance of the matter, though Porter, the bartender, is suspicious. Harold invites Paraskevi, another dancer at the club, home with him, and kills her after she insults him. The disappearences of Shantilly and Pareskevi put pressure on Harold, who denies knowledge of these, and Pareskevi's mother Sophia is also killed by Harold when she investigates her daughter's disapperance. Harold attempts to kill another dancer, Stormy, who gets away, whose story of attempted assault results in police focusing more on Harold in the disappearances. Harold kills another dancer, Dawn, while he is also pursuing his frienship with Sara, including babysitting her young son. Harold wants Sara and he to be lovers but due to the fact that they work together combined with the age difference, Sara keeps things platonic between them. Sara connects the dots and follows Harold one night to where he is dumping the bodies and confronts him the next day, demanding he turn himself in. Harold tries again to kill Stormy in an attempt to silence witnesses, but fails, and decides to stop by Sara's house in order to convince her to come with him as he flees town. Sara refuses, again asking him to turn himself in, but he attacks her. Just in time, the police, who are watching Sara's house in hopes that he would turn up, as they know she is a friend of his from work, arrest him. Sometime later, Sara visits Harold on death row shortly before he is scheduled for execution, when Harold finally shows remorse. After promising to be there in the event the execution goes forward, Sara walks back to her car in the prison parking lot and we see a "Chai" necklace, which is the Hebrew symbol for life, hanging from her rearview mirror, a symbol of life being surrounded by death. The cycle of suffering - repression, depression, killing, and finally execution, is what the title "Privation" references.