A middle aged upper class woman and her family live in an upscale neighborhood. The family's laughter turns malicious when they cannot distinguish between what is comical and what is horrendous and increasingly find amusement at the expense of others.

In a town so small it can hardly be called a town, a black woman serves a rich white family until a series of horrific events causes the single joy in her life to vanish.

A man reflects on the loneliness of his childhood home, where his family would fervently clean the house every Saturday for guests on Sunday who would never show.

When a friend from his drug-dealing past shows up unannounced, a filmographer who lives in the suburbs of Long Island must reckon with how to preserve his suburban fantasy while he tries to save his friend from their former dealer.

An elderly southern man travels to New York City to live with his daughter when he can no longer care for himself. While there, his hatred for his environment reveals his virulent racism and bitter dissatisfaction with his lot in life.

The racism a Black, working-class couple faces at work during the Harlem Renaissance spills over into their relationship in violent ways.

When a woman finds her purse stolen, she retraces the steps of her eventful day only to realize that the encounters, and her life as a whole, are empty and purposeless.

As the era of American farming comes to an end, it proves more difficult than expected for one young man to convince an old woman that she should leave the land for more fruitful prospects.

An older white man in the South agrees to hide a Black fugitive on the same night his old lover visits with her husband and son. When a mob arrives at his house in pursuit of the fugitive, the older man inadvertently causes the death of his newfound kin.

A woman returns home to her family having just slept with another man. At dinner, her son gets into an argument with his father about their privilege. As the narrative moves back to the time they spent abroad in Nigeria, Burma and Ecuador, fractures in the family life are revealed.