The Wicker Man

In The Wicker Man, California highway patrol police officer Edward Malus (Nicolas Cage) stops a station wagon to return a little girl's lost doll while out patrolling the highways. Moments later, a runaway truck slams into the station wagon, igniting it into a fiery wreck with the mother and child trapped inside. Edward tries but fails to save them before the car explodes and then struggles for months after to get the image of their faces out of his head by choking down pills.

But Edward is about to get a second chance when a desperate letter from his former girlfriend, Willow (Kate Beahan), arrives at his home with no postmark. Willow came into his life and left just as unexpectedly years before. But now, her daughter Rowan has gone missing, and Edward is the only person she trusts to help locate her. She asks him to come to her home on a private island--Summersisle--a place with its own traditions where people observe a forgotten way of life. Edward seizes the opportunity to make his life right again, and soon finds himself on a seaplane bound for the islands of the Pacific Northwest.

But nothing is what it seems on isolated Summersisle, where a culture, dominated by its matriarch Sister Summersisle (Ellen Burstyn), is bound together by arcane traditions and a pagan festival called "the Day of Death and Rebirth." The secretive people of Summersisle only ridicule his investigation, insisting that a child named Rowan never existed there...or if she ever did was no longer alive.

But what Edward doesn't know is that Willow's plea for help has invited more into his life than a chance for redemption. In unraveling Summersisle's closely held secrets, Edward is drawn into a web of ancient traditions and murderous deceit, and each step he takes closer to the lost child brings him one step closer to the unspeakable. And one step closer to the Wicker Man.