The movie begins with a group of people, who are trapped underground,
all of them dead except for one man, who is banging on a locked door asking to be let out.
Next, we are taken to a busy city, and see a Mexican man, Memo, who just crossed the border
and is living illegally in the United States. He’s walking into a house, and is greeted
by another man, Alejandro, who calls him his little brother.
We learn that Alejandro lives and works there alone, while his wife and son remain in Mexico.
The following day, we see that the undocumented immigrants are not just
two of them; there are more of them working for below minimum wage to scrape a living.
The two men are standing by the side of the road looking for any work they can get their hands on,
but Memo doesn't seem too enthusiastic about it, and they miss an opportunity to get a job.
It is now evening, and Alejandro asks Memo how much money he made today.
After an awkward silence, he realizes Memo didn't get any work today, so he shares
some of his earnings with him.
Afterwards, we see Alejandro trying to pay something,
but he is told he doesn't even have half of what it cost.
Later on, Alejandro is talking to his
wife on the phone, telling her everything will be fine and to have her suitcases ready to go.
He asks to talk to his son while he is sleeping, and sings him a lullaby.
The next morning, the two brothers are up early, and while getting a bit to eat, head out to look for work.
Among them are another two men who are also looking for work, Hector and Tonio.
At one point, they spot a woman, Liz, buying building supplies, and they take
this opportunity to ask if she needs any workers. At first, she tells them she has contractors,
but when Alejandro tells her they will do a better job for a cheaper price, she agrees.
The four men get into her car, and they drive away.
In the car, they negotiate a price, 500$ per person for the job, and the four of them agree.
Soon after, they arrive at a big house, surrounded by barren land and iron fence,
and they immediately start working.
While on a break from work, Memo seems unfulfilled, but Alejandro has a positive attitude
and tells him he wants to work hard, get money and bring his wife and his child across the border.
The men are working on building an outhouse in the huge garden,
when Memo finds hair in the drilling machine, but he just brushes it off.
Not long after, the nice woman who hired them, Liz, brings over a couple of beers for them to
enjoy while they work. Seeing how nice she is, Hector takes this as an opportunity to get closer
to her, and asks if there is any other work or service he can do inside the house.
She brushes off his advance, and walks back into her house, where it turns out that she already has a husband.
Alejandro makes fun of Hector for failing to flirt with her,
and Hector takes this to heart, and pulls out a switchblade.
But he plays it off as a joke when he sees Memo holding a screwdriver nearby.
Later, we see Tonio knocking on the front door of the house when he gets frightened by Liz's dog.
Tonio asks to use the bathroom, however, Liz politely tells him no because he is filthy.
Later that evening, Hector thinks it is strange that the husband sent his
wife to pick up strangers to work, saying the four of them could be dangerous psychopaths.
It is now dark; while working, Hector the gangster is looking for his missing phone,
saying if he doesn't call his wife, she will be angry.
Suddenly, bright spotlights switch on in the garden, nearly blinding the workers.
Later on, Hector gets frustrated, asking why the couple doesn't come
to stop them from working and why they expect them to work all day and night.
He ends up telling the others they should rest, and then lay down to try and sleep.
Time passes;
they are startled awake when Liz unexpectedly wakes them up by spraying a water hose on them.
She tells them to finish the job, or else she will not pay them.
Reluctant, but desperate for the money, they agree, even though they didn’t expect Liz to behave this way.
It is now the morning, and the men have worked through the whole night. They are visibly tired,
but determined to finish the job.
Memo then sees Liz's husband, Ben, get into his fancy car,
and drive away, using a remote to open and close the gate. He goes over to the fence to get a
closer look, unaware that he’ll get electroshocked when he touches it.
This is probably not a good sign for the four immigrants.
Inside the house, Liz is washing dishes when she hears sounds coming from a cupboard.
She opens it and finds a pack of rats.
Grabbing the nearest blunt object to her,
she begins to smash all the rats, and we get a small glimpse of her dark side.
Meanwhile, Memo and Alejandro are working outside when Memo tells him he is tired of listening to him.
Alejandro says he is just lazy, and that no one cares about Memo except for him.
Memo tells him that maybe he will make enough money to bring his family, but what then,
his son will grow up being a slave just like his father, and this is when Alejandro punches Memo.
In the afternoon, they're so tired that when Tonio's using a saw, he loses focus and
accidentally cuts his hand. When the men notice this, they quickly go to Liz for assistance,
but when they do, she sarcastically pours alcohol, and wraps a bandage over Tonio’s hand, which is bleeding a lot.
The men ask her to bring Tonio to the hospital, but seeing as they
don’t have residence papers, she tells them to finish the job, or else she will call the police.
Memo is fed up being treated like a slave and walks away.
While looking for Memo, Alejandro and Hector come across the electric fence.
Hector touches it and get electrocuted.
Just then, Memo finds them and says the fence goes all the way around the property.
The only way to get out is through the front gate, which is operated by a remote control in the car.
Desperate to get out, Hector breaks into the house to look for the car keys.
As he wanders inside the house, Liz and Ben are not in sight,
and he gets lucky to find the car keys.
Unfortunately, while on his way to join the others waiting outside, he gets shot in the leg by Ben.
The others rush to help him, but Ben fires a
warning shot near them, and tells them to get on the ground. Liz then walks out of the house, and
while Hector is cursing at her, she steps on his head with her heels multiple times, killing him.
She says it was self-defence, and walks back into the house.
Ben tells the others to get up and finish the job and nobody else will get hurt, while pointing a gun at them.
He commands them to put all the sharp tools into a wheelbarrow,
and as this is happening, loud music begins to play
and Liz, wielding a shotgun, runs out of the house and begins to dance.
While Alejandro is working, Ben is watching over him, and asks if he thinks him and Liz are bad people.
In the meantime, Tonio and Memo are cleaning Hector's blood off
the ground while his lifeless body lays beside them. Liz is mocking them,
and since they don't speak English, she tries to teach them. Pointing a shotgun at them,
she forces them to say ‘I am happy,’ while laughing and enjoying the power she has over them.
Later, we see a man coming driving through the front gate.
It is an estate agent who is helping the psychopathic couple sell this house.
Alejandro, Memo and Tonio are nowhere to be seen,
as they are tied up and away from prying eyes.
The estate agent suggests they show the house tomorrow and the couple agree.
Afterwards, Alejandro, Memo and Tonio are lined up in front of Liz and Ben, who tell them their next job is to dig.
While Ben fetches the shovels, Liz tells them to take off their clothes.
Hesitant at first, they comply, as she is pointing a gun at them and they
don't want to die. They strip completely naked, and Ben returns with the shovels.
The three men, wearing no clothes, dig what seems to be graves. Tonio is slowing down
due to his injury, and Alejandro suggests he digs for him as he can’t work. Hearing this, Ben takes
Tonio’s shovel, and smacks him on the head with it, knocking him out.
Liz orders Alejandro and Memo to turn around, and as they do, they pray,
thinking this is where they die.
Liz then laughs and throws them their clothes, while the holes they were digging were actually for some trees.
It is now dark, and Alejandro and Memo are digging the holes with their hands.
While doing this, Memo notices a cable in his hole, and asks to use a shovel in order
to make the hole bigger for the trees. At this moment, Tonio begins to regain consciousness.
Memo is handed the shovel by Ben, and he uses it to break the cable,
causing all of the lights to switch off.
Using this opportunity to escape, Memo and Alejandro
run away in one direction, and while Ben and Liz are distracted, Tonio also manages to escape.
Tonio reaches the electric fence, which is not functional right now, and begins to climb,
while Liz tries to turn the backup power on.
Luckily, Tonio manages to get over just as Ben finds him.
Ben begins to climb the fence, but Liz manages to switch the backup power on,
turning on the electric fence and allowing Tonio to escape.
Just as Tonio gets to a dirt road and sees a car, he gets shot.
Meanwhile, Alejandro and Memo are inside the house, and while searching through Liz's bag, they find a set of keys.
But then, their luck runs out when Liz's dog appears,
and bites Alejandro on the leg, so Memo stabs the dog to death. When the lights turn on,
Liz screams as she sees her dead dog, and Ben knocks the two brothers out with his gun.
The next day, Liz and Ben are expecting the arrival of the house buyers.
Liz opens the door to a lovely couple, Sandra and Homero, who are interested in buying the house.
At the same time, Memo wakes up, covered in dust.
To his surprise, he is now surrounded by the dead bodies of other victims, one of them being Hector.
This shows that the couple has done this to other undocumented immigrant workers before.
He is stuck in what looks like a hole underground with the only way out being a metal door in the ceiling.
He sees Alejandro, who is still alive, but has a big wound on his leg,
so Memo wraps up his leg. He then picks up a stone and begins to bang on the door.
Inside the house, Sandra and Homero begin checking out the house, and seem interested in the design.
The couple goes to see the outhouse, which was recently built with the sweat and blood of the
illegal workers, and Ben proudly tells him it was done by undocumented workers.
Inside the outhouse,
Sandra hears banging beneath her, and as she puts her ear to the floor, she is interrupted by Liz.
Back inside the main house, Sandra notices pictures of other houses on the wall,
and Liz tells her that they are all their houses, and she and Ben renovate them and flip them.
Later in the evening, Memo is still trying to find a way out, but it is no use, the door is not budging.
Above them, the sprinklers switch on, and water begins to seep through the ground,
falling on Memo's face below.
He remembers that Hector had a switchblade with him, so he grabs it,
and then proceeds to pick at the wet dirt, until it all collapses on top of him.
Next, we see the floor of the outhouse break, and out crawls Memo, followed by Alejandro whom he helps get out.
Alejandro can't walk, so Memo tells him to wait there while he goes to find help.
Luckily, he sees a car driving through the main gate, and takes this chance to leave.
As he runs far away from the house, he stumbles on a neighboring house, and enters to look for help.
However, before he can even speak to the owner,
Back with Alejandro; he comes to his senses and realises he is tied to a chair,
and tape over his mouth. Ben enters the room and begins punching him.
He grabs a funnel, sticks it in Alejandro's mouth, and pours in gasoline.
With barely any struggle, Alejandro passes out, but it turns out that he didn't completely
swallow the gasoline, and when Liz walks up to him, he spits the gasoline at her.
She is disgusted by this, and runs outside.
After she leaves, Ben picks up a blade and stabs Alejandro multiple times. Alejandro nudges his
chair toward the hole behind him and falls down, breaking the chair.
Ben then grabs a crowbar, and jumps after him.
Alejandro is hiding among the other dead bodies, and Ben can't find him.
Luckily, he finds Hector's knife, and when Ben gets close enough, he slits his throat,
and then strangles him to death.
Alejandro then gets the remote for the gate out of the car,
and is about to leave, however, he turns back as he has unfinished business.
Liz is in the bathroom cleaning up,
when she sees the outhouse on fire, so she runs out, screaming for Ben.
When she returns to the house, everything inside is broken, which devastates her.
She sees blood leading upstairs, so she grabs a fire poker and heads up.
There, she sees a bed on fire and goes to put the fire out, while Alejandro is waiting behind the door.
Liz wakes up with a shot close to her head.
Now that Alejandro has seen images of homes
constructed by undocumented workers, he realizes the couple has been doing this for some time.
The couple hired the immigrants to build the houses, and afterward, they buried the immigrants beneath
them, most likely because they didn't want to pay the immigrants as well.
With a shotgun pointed at her, he commands her to kneel and beg for mercy.
But as she crawls closer to him, she bites him on the leg with the wound.
He falls off the chair, and she runs outside.
We see Liz running down a dirt road, and Alejandro limping behind her.
At this point, the man who shot Memo spots them.
Alejandro can't seem to keep up with her, when suddenly, she gets shot in the head.
Afterwards, the police arrive, and we see them putting Memo into a body bag.
Seeing as there are no witnesses, the police believe that the culprit was one of the workers who Liz and Ben hired.
Alejandro is now back in the city, paying more money to the guy who can
bring his family across the border, and the man eventually agrees, and promises they will be safe.
In the final scene, we hear a radio talk show proposing a new law, compelled labor,
for illegal workers. It is proposed that anyone who crosses the border illegally
will be owned by the state, and must work any job the state gives them.
A caller says people might say it sounds like slavery, and the talk host finishes with…