Jim Jones builds the Peoples Temple into a movement of thousands before moving hundreds of followers to a remote settlement he names Jonestown, carved out of the Guyanese jungle. The film traces how a congregation that started with promises of racial equality and communal support turned into an isolated compound where Jones controlled food, mail, and movement. Congressman Leo Ryan flies down in November 1978 to investigate reports of abuse, and his visit ends with his own murder on an airstrip as he tries to leave with defectors. Hours later, Jones directs his followers to drink cyanide-laced punch, and more than nine hundred people die, many of them children. Drawing on archival footage, survivor accounts, and the recordings Jones left behind, the film works through how the community's isolation and Jones's control made the massacre possible, and how a group that began as a refuge ended as one of the deadliest mass deaths in American history outside of war.