After the black Sheriff of a small desert town loses her gun, she finds herself investigating a series of shootings. But when she discovers the victims are members of a white supremacist group, the Sheriff begins to suspect her own son is the shooter. 

SYNOPSIS:

Dana once was a city cop. But after mistakenly shooting a child carrying a water pistol, she took her young son, Chandler, to live in a small desert town in a bid to raise him away from the violence of the city. Ten years later, she is now the Sheriff, struggling to raise her teenage son, and remains haunted by her past mistake.

Chandler idolises his dead father, killed in action while serving in the military, despite never having met him. He is caught between his mother, who wishes for him to avoid any conflict, and the bigots that he’s forced to share the community with. Chandler dreams of escaping and finding a cause to fight for.

One night after taking a beating, Chandler attempts to buy a gun from a local drug dealer. That same night, Dana takes a cocktail of drugs and passes out in her car. When she wakes up, she discovers her gun is missing. But she does not report it.

When a dead body is found riddled with bullets, Dana searches the victim’s house and finds evidence to suggest that he was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Among the evidence is a photo of five men in Klan robes and a campaign flyer for a man named Rick O’Brien – a man seeking to replace Dana as Sheriff, and who brazenly uses “a white Sheriff for a white county” as his campaign slogan.

Dana visits O’Brien’s campaign office and asks for the identities of the other men in the photograph, believing that they too are now at risk, and suggesting that she could help protect them. But O’Brien refuses.

When Chandler befriends a Drifter, who teaches him how to shoot and dispenses wisdom about the nature of right and wrong, he finds himself agreeing with the Drifter’s philosophies – that the law does not necessarily represent justice, and that the righteous are morally obliged to punish the wicked. Chandler and the Drifter bond, but this comes at the expense of his relationship with his mother.

The local junkyard owner spots Chandler firing a gun on his property and reports it to Dana. She confronts her son but Chandler reacts angrily – he believes his father was a fighter and would have raised him to be the same. But by contrast he sees Dana as an apathetic cop and mother. He slams down one of O’Brien’s flyers under her nose, telling her she’s a joke, and storms out of the house.

The next day a skinhead is found murdered, and Dana learns that he’d been distributing O’Brien’s flyers at the time he was gunned down. O’Brien chooses to use the slayings to his advantage and holds an impromptu meeting at the town hall to further agitate the townspeople, claiming that Dana’s inherent racial bias prevents her from doing her job.

But the meeting is cut short when a local Farmer opens fire on O’Brien and his campaign staff, killing one of them and injuring O’Brien. Manning, the Sheriff’s deputy, shoots the gunman dead. Dana pleads with O’Brien to cancel his highly publicized impending rally, but with the suspected shooter now dead, O’Brien refuses.

As Dana searches for evidence to prove O’Brien’s ties to the KKK and identify the five men in the mysterious photograph, Chandler gets into an altercation with a friend who he witnessed attending the town hall meeting in support of O’Brien.

Chandler retreats to the desert to search for his new father figure, the Drifter, only to discover he has a swastika and other Klan affiliated tattoos.

Dana finds her son’s friend shot dead, and when ballistics prove that the farmer who shot up the town hall was not responsible for the previous killings, she searches Chandler’s room and finds her own gun. Wanting to protect her son, she manipulates evidence; planting her own drugs on the body and stashing the gun in the drug dealer’s car to frame him for the crime.

Dana drives Chandler into the city. She takes him to see his father, alive, but suffering from severe PTSD and living on the streets. She confesses that she lied to protect him, but tells Chandler that she will protect him no more. His choices are his own to make, and his to live with. Chandler tries to talk to his father, but it is hopeless. His father is broken beyond help.

Chandler returns to the only father figure he has – the Drifter. After Chandler confronts the Drifter about his racist tattoos, he tells the teenager that he is in fact O’Brien’s son, born to a white supremacist and taught to hate those not like himself. The Drifter, guilt-ridden, has returned to kill the five KKK members from the photograph and anybody that associates with them. He presents Chandler with a choice – take the gun used to kill the KKK members and hand it to the law, or take the gun and join his cause.

Chandler makes his choice. Together he and the drifter rob a gun store and prepare to attend O’Brien’s campaign rally – the same rally presided over by his own mother, a black Sheriff in charge of protecting the very same white supremacist who is campaigning to replace her in her position of authority.

WOUNDS