 Francesa Kinsolving, a very pregnant widow whose husband was rescently killed in action in Vietnam, travels to visit her late husband s mother in a snowy Minnesota town only to get snowed in during a fierce blizard where she s forced to wait it out only to slowly uncover some terrible dark secrets that Mrs. Kinsolving has been hiding, one of them is her psychotic other son, a recent escapee from a lunatic asylum, who is shacked up in the basement of the house.