1950's America. Dr. Wallace Fiennes, employs Andy, an introverted young man as a photographer to document an asylum tour - advocating for the continued use of his controversial, possibly immoral, lobotomy procedure. Andy is gradually confronted to the inefficiency of the doctor's method and will identify with the patients. When the two reach a California mountain village, a growing center of the New Age movement, they encounter a bizarre French healer who strangely requests the procedure for his own daughter.