Stripped of the house he grew up in and squatting in abandoned shelters, Lester Ballard survives amongst the godforsaken Appalachians of Tennessee. The period is sometime during the 1960s. Divest of kin, social order and the basic skills of articulation, he is considered a pariah in the Sevier County community. He roams the woods with a shotgun, attends a Fair where he wins plush toys that become his only friends before his descent into moral depravity is made complete one night when he comes across the corpses of a young couple in a car.

Based upon the searing novel by Pulitzer Prize winning author Cormac McCarthy Child of God examines the dispossession and feral estrangement of an outcast through his isolation and eventual violent and depraved journey to cave dwelling necrophiliac hunted by the law. Directed and starring James Franco and featuring a stunning performance from Scott Haze, Child of God delivers a chilling portrait with flashes of lyricism and rough-hewn colloquial details as if conjured from a mind warped by exile.