Imagining Monticello
Sara Stevens: wife, mother, history professor, is kidnapped by a group of right-wing extremists that call themselves the Constitutionalists. Eighteen months earlier, her 17-year-old son, Johnny, was killed in a random bombing attack by the same group. Terrified, sensory deprived (blindfolded and ears plugged), and confined, Sara copes by imagining herself as different women throughout history, giving her suffering a meaningful context. Her nightmarish narrative is corroborated by Johnny’s factual narrative. Johnny exists as an omniscient witness to his mother’s ordeal.
For thirty-three days, Sara lives a primitive, 18th-century life which includes physical labor and hardship as a captive in an abandoned country house. As life falls into a repetitive pattern of chores, to hang on to her sanity, she imagines the house as Monticello, her captor as Thomas Jefferson, and herself as Sally Hemings. Sara does not understand she is sinking into Stockholm Syndrome. It’s only when she realizes her captor and his brethren are planning another historic attack and that he was responsible for the bomb that killed Johnny, does she devise a diabolical plan to stop them.