In this stunning adaptation of the acclaimed novel by Nobel Laureate J.M. Coetzee, John Malkovich stars as David Lurie, a 52 year-old professor of Romantic Literature who takes a beautiful young student under his wing and into his bed. To David, the affair is just a harmless fling but, because this is post-Apartheid South Africa, and because the student in question is of mixed race, a scandal erupts that forces David to abandon his lifelong profession and a lifetime's worth of assumptions about himself and the world he lives in. Disgraced, he leaves the city for the remote farm where his free-spirit daughter, Lucy, lives a seemingly uncomplicated rustic life. But, neither David nor Lucy can escape the realities of contemporary society. When they fall prey to a particularly brutal attack by three black men, the very fabric of their lives unravels and they find that the definitions of victim and victimizer, of oppressed and oppressor, have forever changed.