A man is found murdered on an impoverished south London housing estate. He had been crucified, his hands and feet nailed to a wooden cross, and his feet doused in petrol and set alight. To the excitement and fear of the media, the police and local politicians the man is known to be associated with a local cult.

The cult is led by Will, an ambitious preacher. His message is that that the only way for humans to find happiness is by being good to others. It is part of our genetic make-up, a function of our creation as a social animal. For humans to be good, they need to suppress their instinctive tendency towards evil. To do this they need to feel inferior to, as in they need to worship, those rare people that are pure goodness.

To spread his message and grow his movement Will relies on the publicity the cult generates by cleaning up the local housing estates, freeing them from crime, violence and poverty.

A newspaper picture of the crucified man is recognized by Jack, an unsuccessful solicitor with a romantic disposition and a casual ability with violence. Two years before the man had persuaded his fiancée to leave him to join the cult. Afraid for his missing fiancée in the wake of the murder, finding an excuse to search for her and still carrying the humiliation that her departure imposed on him, Jack pretends to join the cult. Mystified by the murder, partly impressed and partly contemptuous of the cult’s message, Jack struggles to find his fiancée.

Max is a gay church going police officer, who combines a liberal philosophy with an unstable ambition and a bitter hostility to the other policemen around him. He feels his position threatened by the vigilante activities of the cult. Seeing the murder as the looked for final proof of the sinister nature of the cult he applies increasing pressure on it as he attempts to find the murderers. Nothing however is as he expects.

With Jack and Max looking on the cult ties itself into an escalating cycle of confrontation, intimidation and protest with the world around it as its growing power coupled with its instinctive paranoia feeds off and feeds the surrounding hostility. Inevitably and inexorably, the cult is drawn into violence, the total contradiction of its own reason for existence.