Jared is taken to the coast by his new girlfriend, Alice. They stay in the seaside cottage she's owed all her life with her sister, Cleo. As soon as he gets there, Jared begins to have haunting dreams of a distant exotic land. The dreams excite Alice. Even more weird is that when Cleo unexpectedly turns up, she somehow seems to know what happens in the dreams without him telling her. Gradually Jared realises that the sisters are using his dreams to uncover a long-buried secret from their childhood, when they lived in Vietnam and their parents were brutally murdered. But who was the murderer? And why does Jared begin to feel that his life is now threatened? As the landscape and the house reveal their secrets, Jared becomes more and more drawn into the twisted world of The Boat People. First they take over his dreams, then they take over his mind.