Dark Harbor

A comfortably wealthy lawyer and his trophy wife speed through the rain in their Mercedes, intent on getting to the ferry on time to make their planned dinner date, bickering pointlessly over their lateness and the risky driving. Suddenly they spot a person collapsing by the side of the road and reluctantly pull over. The person turns out to be a young drifter who, when roused, resists all suggestions that the police be called or that he see a doctor or visit a hospital. Giving the young man a ride, they reach the ferry dock too late, and take a room for the night, while the young man goes on his way with a handout of cash from the sympathetic wife, despite the cynicism of the husband. The wife begins to seduce her husband, but he is distracted by having forgotten the food at the dock, and she gives up. The next day they catch the ferry, oblivious to the fact that the young man is also aboard. They then navigate their runabout to the wife's inherited vacation home, where their pastoral lunch seems marred by an underlying tension. Venturing out in their sailboat, they encounter a fog bank and run aground on Seal Rock. The wife is surprised by the same young man, who the husband knocks unconscious with a tree limb mistakenly believing she is in danger. When the boy comes to, he explains how he was carried off by the ferry while asleep, and happened to run aground on the island when trying to return on a boat he "borrowed". With his help, the couple get their sailboat unstranded and return to the vacation house with the young man where they warm up by the fire and, exhausted, go to sleep. The wife awakes in the night and goes to speak with the drifter on the couch near the fire; he acts on the sexual tension between them and, although she rejects his advances, the husband appears wielding an axe; at which point the wife awakens, still in bed with her husband. The next day the couple awake to discover that the drifter has made them a magnificent breakfast, in gratitude. As they eat, the wife happily reminisces about her romantic youth as a student at Yale; when the boy asks for a ride back to the ferry terminal in the runabout, the husband comes out of his funk to demand jovially that the boy stay for a dinner prepared by the husband, the wife to judge whether it or the boy's breakfast was the better meal. The three lounge around for a morning which is both relaxing and tense; when the husband goes off to play golf, the wife awakens the boy napping in the boathouse, and the two engage in aimlessly childish play before the wife takes him into the woods to pick wild mushrooms, on which she was schooled by her father before he committed suicide. She demonstrates to the young man the subtle difference between two similar mushrooms; the deadly amanita rubenica and the amanita muscaria, an aphrodisiac. In reality this time, the boy acts on the sexual attraction between them, using his sleight of hand skills to tease her with the amanita muscaria, but is rebuffed by the wife. The husband returns home feeling ill, but rouses himself to set up the promised dinner, then take the boy back to the ferry; however the powerboat engine dies and they return to the house. The next day, the longstanding tensions between the couple and the new rivalry between the two men over the wife finally erupt into an argument between the couple, which suddenly turns into the husband chasing the drifter out of the house into the woods. After he abandons the chase, the wife finds the drifter and finally succumbs to his advances, as he continues yesterday's seduction by teasing her with the amanita muscaria mushroom in an erotic fashion. The scene abruptly shifts to the burial of the wife, as the reverend says she committed suicide for unknown reasons. The husband returns to the vacation home, where he meets the young man again; and it becomes clear that the two are lovers who have apparently done away with the wife, presumably by the boy using his prestidigitation to feed her the deadly amanita rubenica instead of the aphrodisiac species.