The school counselor visits the family’s house to discuss their younger child’s behavior in kindergarten. She has been having tantrums for the last few months, and there is word about an imaginary friend. While the parents talk with the counselor, the younger child plays with a vacuum in another room. The parents mention that they plan to take the younger child and her older sister—who is currently schooling at CalArts—up a vacation home in Sonoma in the summer. The younger child then shrieks, and the parents discover that she has pulled out one of her eyes with the suction of the vacuum cleaner.

The parents and their two daughters are driving up to Sonoma. The younger child has an eyepatch now, and she keeps playing with it despite her older sister’s protestations. The older sister has a stomach ache. Everyone is restless, especially with the younger child’s antics, like kicking the back of her mother’s seat or arguing with her older sister. Up in Sonoma, the mother has been fixing up her deceased father’s house so that they can later sell it. She recalls how her mother passed at a young age, and her father saw her as a disappointment for giving up piano. After the father passes, the summer house in Sonoma is bequeathed to her via his lawyer. She also recalls the ice cream man, an urban legend concerning a tall man who kills people with a carving knife and scoops out their bodies as one would ice cream. Soon enough, the family gets to the summer house, and they meet the lawyer outside.

For the next few days, the family lives in the summer house as normal. The older sister, an artist, draws in her sketchbook while she wanders the surrounding forest. She recalls the reason for her coming along here with her family—even though it meant surrendering an internship—and how she has been overly concerned about her younger sister since the eye incident. For most of her life, she has had nightmares about her, and now she sees them retrospectively as warnings. Although she doesn’t know what will happen to her younger sister, she knows that she has to be here with her. However, the younger sister has been much happier since coming here, whereas the parents have been fighting more, spending the days in foul moods. While wandering the forest, the older sister sees a dog, the sculptures of the sculpture garden, and a burned part of grass. She then hears voices coming from those statues. When she investigates further, she finds her younger sister. It’s unclear what she’s doing here. They head back together.

The father has been restless ever since coming here. He recalls his father-in-law, how he was a composer whom he greatly admired and got to know before his wife estranged herself from him. Because of his admiration, the mother has never spoken to her husband about how terrible of a father he actually was. Their conversations about him have always been evasive. The father then recalls when the two of them visited the summer house together—back when the father-in-law was still alive. At dinner, the father gets unnerved by his father-in-law and vows to never show his own compositions to him. Since then, he has felt at a distance from his father-in-law. Now, at the summer house, after the father-in-law’s death, he feels a sense of kinship to him, specifically the music library he left behind. He spends most of his days drinking his father-in-law’s wine and perusing his father-in-law’s music notebooks. One night, while reading through old scores, the father hears and finds his younger child eating ice cream on the hallway floor. The younger child reveals that her grandfather, his father-in-law, spoke to her every day before he died. The father then realizes that her imaginary friend has been his father-in-law all along.

Ever since she got here, the mother has felt her father’s presence all around. She wants to leave, but she doesn’t know who else can fix up the summer house so that it can be ready to sell. Outside her bedroom window, she sees the ice cream man, the urban legend from her childhood. She gets scared, but she chalks it up to anxiety and tries to calm herself down. She then sees an old foot touching hers, and after jumping back in surprise, she sees her deceased father in front of her, surrounded by the steam of the adjacent bathroom. When the steam clears, so too does her father. The mother then sees her younger child in the doorway. They talk for a little while, and the mother discovers that the younger child’s imaginary friend is the ice cream man. The mother is surprised, as she has never told anyone about the ice cream man. The mother tries to get her younger child to explain how she knows about him, after which she decides that the whole family must leave. She rallies everyone to gather by the car outside.

The younger child disappears. Police arrive, but they don’t see her vanishing as a serious circumstance yet. All day and night, the family searches the summer house. The mother looks around the sculpture garden and falls asleep beside one. The father suddenly experiences a jolt of creativity and holes himself up in the music library to compose. When the mother wakes up, she sees her father’s face all over the bats hanging from each tree around her. Meanwhile, the younger child has been at the sculpture garden all along, albeit made invisible by her grandfather.

In the morning, the father tells the mother that he’s been composing all night. The mother gets angry at him for wasting time while their younger child is gone. The father talks a walk to clear his head, and both the mother and the older sister try to look for him in the nearby woods. The father stumbles into the ice cream man, who kills him with a carving knife right away much like the urban legend from the mother’s youth would suggest. The mother and older sister stumble upon his body and then run away. They see the younger child close to the summer house, but she runs inside, as she is called by her grandfather. She wants to stay in the summer house forever and ever.

Inside of the summer house, the mother and older sister find that the younger child has somehow merged with her grandfather. At first, she has her own body but her grandfather’s head. When she speaks, the grandfather speaks. The grandfather tells them to listen what he says, or else there will be consequences. Later on, the surviving family decides to not only keep the summer house but to stay in it. The father’s death is chalked up to mere disappearance. Together, the family and the lawyer resolve to keep the vineyard maintained and working. Here, the younger child can do whatever she wants, like wandering around the woods without no one stopping her.