Otto Warmbier was a 21-year-old University of Virginia student on a tour through North Korea when he was arrested at the airport for allegedly tearing down a propaganda poster from a hotel wall. The film traces his arrest, his televised confession, and the 15-year hard-labor sentence handed down by a North Korean court, then follows the 17 months that passed with almost no information reaching his family in Cincinnati. It reconstructs the diplomatic pressure that eventually brought him home in 2017, and the shock that met his parents, Fred and Cindy Warmbier, when they saw him: blind, deaf, and unresponsive, having already suffered the brain damage that would kill him within days. Interviews and news footage lay out the competing explanations offered for his condition, from botulism to physical abuse, none of them ever confirmed by Pyongyang. The film treats his case as both a personal tragedy and a flashpoint in US-North Korea relations, ending where his parents' fight for answers picks up.