Professionally intertwined and privately entangled, film producers Mairin and Donny share hotel rooms and a climate documentary that has stretched on for years unfinished. Everyone assumes they’ll officially be together someday – once Donny leaves his wife and Mairin isn’t dating someone else. Then Donny falls through the arctic ice while on location.

Mairin returns home to tell her family that a hole in a northern, frozen bay now lives in the middle of their Southern California living room. She doesn’t know how she’ll find her next job, let alone live her life without Donny. And grief exposes what has long gone unnamed: their family situation was never stable.

Beow, the father of her daughter and now her mother’s husband, retreats into imaginary conversations with his dead best friend while as a crisis at his school threatens his job. Mairin’s mother, Aiofe, revisits both the violence of her Irish childhood and a drinking habit she cannot fully outrun. And Mairin’s daughter, Halie, channels her anger into a messy boyfriend-girlfriend situation and a graffiti habits as she grasps at anything to keep from thinking about her other-dad who fell through the ice because he thought he could save the world with a camera. 

Meanwhile, California itself destabilizes. Flash floods tear through dry riverbeds. Wildfires threaten the Malibu hills. Evacuations become routine. The ground shifts beneath them, mirroring the fragility of the roles they’ve been performing for years.

THIS ONE TIME examines how loss permanently reshapes identity—and how a family must decide whether to fracture under that change or rebuild around it.