David, a 52-year-old English professor in Cape Town, is forced to teach communications classes after his department is disbanded.

David pursues a young student named Melanie Isaacs, pressuring her into a sexual relationship despite her obvious reluctance.

David arrives uninvited at Melanie's apartment and forces himself on her; she does not resist but is clearly unwilling.

Melanie files a formal sexual harassment complaint against David at the university.

At the university hearing, David pleads guilty to the charges but refuses to apologize or attend counseling.

David is forced to resign from his teaching position after refusing to meet the university's conditions.

David travels to visit his daughter Lucy, who runs a small farm and dog-boarding kennel in rural Salem.

Three men trick their way onto Lucy's farm, shoot the boarded dogs, rape Lucy, and steal David's car.

When police take a statement from Lucy after the attack, she omits any mention that she was raped.

David suspects Petrus, Lucy's neighbor and former employee, was involved in the farm attack, but Lucy refuses to entertain this.

Lucy recognizes one of her attackers at Petrus's party; David confronts the boy before he and Lucy leave together.

After returning to Cape Town, David finds that someone has broken into his home and robbed him.

David attends a theater performance where Melanie has a part; her boyfriend confronts him and says Melanie hates him.

Lucy reveals she is pregnant from the rape and insists she will keep the baby, shocking David.

David carries the dog he has bonded with at the clinic to its euthanasia, telling Bev he is giving the dog up.

David Lurie is a complacent Cape Town professor who exploits his position to coerce a student into sex, igniting a formal harassment complaint that ends his career. After refusing to show remorse at the university hearing, he loses his job and retreats to his daughter Lucy's rural farm. The farm is violently attacked, Lucy is raped, and David is left burned and helpless. Back in Cape Town, he stalks Melanie at a theater performance only to be told she hates him, and returns home to find his house ransacked. He eventually learns Lucy is pregnant from the rape and intends to keep the baby, forcing him to accept her choices. His journey ends at the veterinary clinic, where he euthanizes the dog he has grown to love — a quiet act of sacrifice that signals his changed self.

The headline events driving David Lurie's fall and hard-won acceptance.

David spots his sex worker Soraya in public with her two sons; their subsequent meetings grow cool and she soon stops seeing him.

Frustrated after losing Soraya, David has a brief and unsatisfying affair with Dawn, a new department secretary.

Melanie's boyfriend visits David's office, accuses him of sleeping with Melanie, and shoves his papers off his desk.

Melanie drops David's course; her father George calls David, unaware of the affair, thinking Melanie is simply overworked.

A group of Women Against Rape students gathers outside the university hearing and demands that David apologize.

David's ex-wife Rosalind meets him and tells him he is too old to be meddling with other people's children.

David meets Petrus, Lucy's former employee who has used a government land grant to become her neighboring landowner.

David and Lucy visit Bev and Bill Shaw at their home; David tells Lucy he loathes animal-welfare people and finds the visit repellent.

At Bev's clinic, David assists with animal patients for the first time and confesses he is there because he is in disgrace.

Lucy's neighbor Ettinger drives the injured David and traumatized Lucy to the hospital after the farm attack.

Petrus reappears at the farm with construction materials days after the attack; David notes he was conveniently absent during it.

David and Petrus work together on a dam; David hints that Lucy was raped, but Petrus refuses to acknowledge it.

Lucy tells David that what happened to her during the attack is purely private and asks him not to interfere with her response.

David goes to the farmers' market with Petrus; a newspaper article describes him as an elderly father and misspells his name.

David rents a room near Lucy's farm and begins the routine of driving the clinic's dead dogs to the incinerator.

Before his affair with Melanie, David's loneliness is already visible in his failed attempts to push beyond a transactional arrangement with a sex worker and a regrettable fling with a department secretary. At Lucy's farm, he is introduced to the post-apartheid landscape through figures like Petrus and Bev Shaw, whose practical lives contrast sharply with his intellectual pretensions. After the farm attack, David is ferried to hospital by a gun-carrying neighbor and slowly steps into Lucy's daily routines, including the farmers' market. He works alongside Petrus, attends his party as an outsider, and begins the unglamorous task of driving dead dogs to the incinerator. These quieter events show the texture of David's gradual, reluctant integration into a world that has no special place for him.

The supporting scenes that build David's world and chart its slow collapse.

David hires a detective to find Soraya's contact details and calls her at home; she tells him to stop harassing her.

David chats up student Melanie Isaacs after class and convinces her to come to his home for dinner.

David falsely records Melanie as present in class and awards her a passing midterm grade despite her repeated absences.

Melanie arrives at David's apartment asking to stay the night; he makes a bed for her in his daughter's old room.

David watches Melanie rehearse a play from the dark of an empty theater, feeling embarrassed by his own surveillance.

Melanie's father George confronts David outside his office and accuses him directly of having a sexual relationship with Melanie.

Professor Mathabane offers David a final chance to keep his job by signing a prewritten apology statement; David refuses.

David falls asleep beside Katy, an abandoned bulldog in Lucy's kennel, and later apologizes to Lucy for his failings as her father.

Locked in the bathroom during the attack, David watches through the window as the men shoot each of Lucy's boarded dogs.

Lucy tells David the attackers treated her with such personal hatred that it shocked her; David suggests history was speaking through them.

David and Bev have sex on the floor of the empty, unlit clinic after she invites him there on his day off.

David accepts a dinner invitation from the Isaacs family and kneels before Mrs. Isaacs and her daughter Desiree to beg forgiveness.

David abandons his original opera concept and begins reimagining it around Teresa as a middle-aged, discarded woman rather than around Byron.

Petrus acknowledges his connection to attacker Pollux and offers to take Lucy as an additional wife to protect her and her property.

David catches Pollux watching Lucy through a window and attacks him; shaken by what he sees in himself, he agrees to leave the farm.

From the moment David's obsession with Melanie overrides his judgment, a chain of revelations slowly dismantles his self-serving worldview. He falsifies Melanie's academic record, is confronted by her furious father, and refuses the university's final offer of redemption rather than sign an apology he considers insincere. At Lucy's farm, an unexpected tenderness toward an abandoned bulldog opens the first crack in his emotional armor, and being locked in a bathroom during the attack — forced to watch helplessly as the kennel dogs are shot — strips him of any illusion of power or control. Lucy's raw account of the attackers' personal hatred begins to connect his own actions to theirs. Back in Cape Town, he kneels before Melanie's family in a gesture of apology, rewrites his opera around an aging, discarded woman who mirrors himself, and finally confronts Pollux face-to-face before agreeing, at last, to step back from his daughter's life.