 Due to budget cuts, an asylum for the criminally insane releases the infamous Ethel Janowski, a morbidly obese woman whose obsession with food caused her to murder six people 13 years earlier, into a halfway house operated by the elderly Hope Bartholomew.As soon as Ethel is admitted into the Bartholomew House, it becomes clear that she's still delusional, convinced that Hope is her dead grandmother, and that a fellow patient named Edgar Stanley is the detective who arrested her.As time passes, Ethel begins demanding more food and refusing to take her medication.