17-year-old Ree Dolly's father is absent and her mother suffers from severe depression, so she alone struggles to provide for their poverty-stricken family in the rural Ozarks. When Ree learns that her father has put their house up as collateral for his bail bond and then disappeared, she sets out to find him before the court seizes their property and turns their family out into the woods. Challenging her outlaw kin's code of silence and risking her life, Ree sorts through the lies, evasions and threats of her relatives and begins to piece together the truth.