It's just another night in a midtown bar , and all the regulars are there doing what they usually do. Curtis , a travel writer, tries to impress the beautiful and charismatic bartender, Brett. Neurotic and intellectual, Mhari drinks too much and talks too much as she deals with her divorce. Another bartender named Mean Tommy, hits on various women even as his girlfriend Janine sits quietly reading at the bar. And middle-aged Stan complains about how rotten the world's becoming. All in all, just another night, and it ends at last call like so many other nights do - with a bar brawl. A bunch of drunks throw a few fists around and are quickly shown the door.

Later, when Brett and Mean Tommy are cleaning up, the others stick around for a drink after hours. They talk inevitably about the brawl, the high point of their evening, but they soon fall into more practised and familiar conversational rhythms, telling the same stories and playing the same routines they've gone through on countless similar nights.

Suddenly, there's someone pounding on the back door. It's Nice Tommy, an off-duty bartender who helped break up the brawl. He's been jumped and beaten by the guys they threw out, and rescued by a man none of the others have seen before. A stranger who helped fight off the attackers and pulled Nice Tommy back to the bar. In the next instant, those same attackers barge back into the place! In a panic, Brett and Curtis struggle against them, with Mean Tommy forcing the attackers back with a bat he grabs from behind the bar. By the time the dust clears and they've bolted the door, one of their attackers lies dead on the floor, his head cracked open by a swing from Mean Tommy's bat.

With their attackers waiting at both doors, the others call the police and wait for help. But as they wait, the traumatic horror of the situation slowly sinks in - Nice Tommy's hurt bad and Mean Tommy's killed a guy. Strangely, the police don't arrive and as the group’s anxiety grows, the stranger who helped Nice Tommy tries to ease the tension with his compelling, good-natured assuredness. He gradually insinuates himself into the lives of the others, lightening the mood with stories of his travels, of the situations he's been in worse than this, and charming them with an impossible bar trick.

Not everyone's so easily won over, however, as Janine secretly confides her mistrust of the stranger to Brett and Curtis; his account of helping Nice Tommy, and his various other stories, don't hold up - but these suspicions come too late. The stranger's already playing mind games with both Mhari and Mean Tommy, revealing himself to be less a good samaritan than a possibly dangerous psychotic who initiates a string of events that will expose hidden fears and deep lies, culminating in a moment that will forever change all of their lives. A moment in which it all happens incredibly fast.