Luke, a seven-year-old American boy visits Mexico with his mother, Ingrid, who has taken the boy to a small town to visit the tomb of Javier, the father he never knew. But Ingrid has ulterior motives: addicted to painkillers and unable to provide for her child, she intends to abandon him with Javier's sister, Mercedes, who refuses to recognize him as family. While visiting Javier's tomb, Luke finds a set of old Loteria cards and uses them as inspiration to construct a fantasy though which he tries to make sense of the events in his life.

While Ingrid awaits for Mercedes to respond to her overtures, Luke wanders alone in their hotel, exploring unknown and hidden rooms, and experiences visions that could be fantasies, premonitions or supernatural manifestations.

Luke meets a group of actors who are rehearsing a production of Don Juan. Without fully comprehending the text, Luke intuits that the play speaks of his mother's relationships with the men in her life, and he sees himself reflected in it. Luke's haunted imagination creates an intense fantasy world in which the central premonition becomes the death of his mother.