On the drive up to Free Mountain College where she’s been hired for her first teaching job, Terra, 33, has a doom filled-dream: she’s in the snow, pregnant and spewing black liquid out of her mouth. When she arrives on campus, she finds out that she’s been housed in a dorm with the students.
In her first class, she meets Emma, a Native student, who chides her for giving up activism for teaching. One lonely weekend, Terra borrows a colleague’s car to drive Emma and her classmates to a protest against a local oil pipeline. When the protest turns violent and a student gets hurt, Terra receives a warning from the Dean.
As Terra uncovers the school’s corruption and ties to the pipeline, her bond with Emma deepens and she starts to question the life she’s been leading, including her relationship with her boyfriend and the prospect of having a child. Terra slowly loses her grip on reality and in a moment of madness, engages in a destructive act of revenge against the school.

Terra is like a fever dream of our collective psyche, as we walk around carrying violent, internal images of environmental destruction and fears about the end of the world, wondering what can be done to alter the course of things.
Terra is a psychological thriller about the inner workings of Terra’s mind: her desire to find meaning and align her actions with her beliefs. In her final hallucination, as a wild woman wandering through the woods, Terra has to confront the horror of having both freed herself and destroyed all of her social ties.
Terra is also about the difficulty of preserving one’s moral compass in an individualistic society fraying at the seams. In her single-mindedness to effect change, Terra ends up harming Emma, who is unfairly left to carry the emotional burden of her actions.
Terra’s journey into darkness is mirrored by the more hopeful one that Emma takes as she refuses violence and comes into her own as a community-minded activist.