The world is ending – slowly, and without much ceremony. It has been raining for a very long time, ferries are now the most sensible mode of transport in a city where the dams have broken. STEPHEN Carmichael the architect of this new world on stilts, floating above water – has died, leaving behind his three daughters: highly-strung psychotherapist ISLA (36), IRENE (35, the prettiest one) and hot-tempered AGNES (24, hot-tempered), as well as his long absent wife MARIE – who is presumably somewhere out there in the world, but won’t turn up for the funeral.
Stephen and his influence has shaped the fading city his daughters inhabit. His fantastical house, The White Horse, dangles at the precipice of the water’s edge, a fantastic structure. Till his last day, he still enjoyed important delights – olives, red meat – that are no longer accessible to the majority of the population. Through his work, he built himself and others like him a refuge from an evident and all-encompassing climate catastrophe.
The three daughters are estranged at the time of his death. All three are lesbians. Isla, the sensible, governing one is going through a divorce with her wife, MORVEN, who has left for a better life outside of the city. Irene is happily coupled with but highly dependent upon JUDE (30s, non-binary, very tall). Agnes is crucially non-committal, avoidant, and her sisters cannot get ahold of her. Agnes works in a café, and there, one day, she meets Stephanie, a customer with whom she begins a passionate if initially reluctant relationship. Stephanie’s assertive pursuit of Agnes reaches through to her, and Agnes begins to lean on Stephanie as an emotional support while she attempts to make sense of what her father’s loss means.
Isla carries on with the arrangements, isolated in her house, keeping appointments with an array of disturbed clientele, struggling with her own mental health, while she feels abandoned and put upon by her sisters. Many years ago, when Isla was 11, her mother took her own life by drowning after suffering a mysterious breakdown.
Almost immediately afterwards, Stephen married Marie, and had Agnes. Marie then disappeared. Isla and Irene having grown up separately to Agnes, with a different mother, adds an extra layer of resentment to the difficult relations between the three.
Isla and Irene meet with Stephen’s lawyer to hear his will read. They cannot reach Agnes. The lawyer explains that as financial agreements had been reached with the daughters prior to Stephen’s death, the rest of his estate will go to his chosen charities. Except for the house – the house and the contents therein have been left to Agnes. Isla and Irene are surprised and upset, while each asserting that they did not want the house, nor did they want anything from Stephen at all. He had always used his money to control them.
Unable to reach Agnes, Isla continues to pay for the housekeeper, CAROLINE, to care for the property.
Four years ago, Stephen had a heart attack and nearly died. Afterwards, he tried to give all of his money away
to the sisters. Isla and Agnes refused his gift, but Irene accepted and used the money to pay off her student
loans, and buy a flat for her and Jude. Irene has never told Isla this, knowing it would upset her. For the sisters,
greater than their resentment of each other is a unanimous and complex hatred of their father. He was
simultaneously emotionally abusive and withholding. Isla and Irene attempt to grapple with his complicated
legacy, while Agnes has attempted to divorce herself from his influence entirely.
Agnes and Stephanie’s relationship is cemented when they witness a woman die by suicide by leaping off of
the ferry. This is the latest in a series of disturbing incidents where Agnes believes that people are watching her,
saying odd things – customers in the café, a nurse she brushed paths with in the hospital while her father died.
Agnes’ central respite has been swimming at the leisure centre, which now informs her they will all but close
given the increasing expense of electricity. Agnes moves in with Stephanie and her substantial cohort of
flatmates, and Stephanie shows Agnes a disused swimming pool on the roof of their building which has now
been refilled to usability with the constant rain.
At the funeral, Isla and Irene are very upset to see Agnes turn up with Stephanie – a stranger. The women
argue when Isla explains that Agnes has been left the house. Agnes insists that she doesn’t want it. Irene
confesses that she took money from Stephen when it was offered. Stephanie and Jude observe the argument –
Stephanie tells Jude that it can be hard to sympathise with Agnes sometimes, her own family living in the kind
of poverty that Stephen built palaces above to ignore. Jude tells Stephanie that the reason the sisters seem to
hate each other so much is that at the heart of it, there is love between them.
The sisters continue to avoid each other and things fall apart. Isla begins corresponding with Caroline more
frequently, who assures her that all is well with the house. She wishes she could shift responsibility to Agnes
now, but Agnes is thoroughly uninterested in the house and her inheritance. A landslide causes the house next
to Isla’s to sink into the earth, and out of existence. Meanwhile, across the city, the power goes out, things
descend into darkness. At the café, Agnes meets the doctor who spoke cryptically to her in the hospital. She
knows something is amiss, but cannot say why or how.
Irene brokers peace and arranges that the three should meet at the White Horse with some wine and frozen
pizzas. They meet there, and begin to finally have the conversation, when they are interrupted by the faces of a
hundred grinning strangers pressed up against the glass, a cohort led by Caroline.
The figures burst into the house and overtake it, in pursuit of Agnes – the prophesied child. It is explained, in vague terms, that Stephen had Agnes and put her in this house as some sort of sacrificial lamb. Giving Agnes to the people will repair the debt of all that he has taken from the world. Caroline charges Agnes with a knife when the entire house begins to collapse into the water – the house was never meant to hold this many people.
Everyone plunges into the water, the grinning strangers drown as Isla and Irene pull Agnes from the wreckage, and snow begins to fall.