Ten years ago, The Screech was the hottest lesbian band on the scene. Iris and Lily fronted. MJ produced. Their one hit record bought two houses in the desert — and then everything fell apart. Now these four older lesbians are stuck in the wreckage of their lives: Iris drinking through dreams of a comeback that’s never coming, MJ having internet sex and staring at an empty pool, still in love with the woman she can’t quit. Carol and Lily, so bored in their lesbian relationship they’ve decided to have a child just to feel something.

Then Cricket stumbles in. Young, belligerent, looking for trouble. A coke-fueled pool party spirals into chaos — and by the end of the night, Cricket is dead on the pool deck. These four lesbian women, bound by decades of history somewhere between family and gang, do what they’ve always done: they handle it. They bury the body. They pour the cement. They move on.

Until they can’t.

A year later, Cricket’s face is on missing person flyers outside Iris’s liquor store. And a mysterious butch stranger named Skye shows up at Lily and Carol’s door — with revenge in mind and seduction as her weapon.

The Owls is a groundbreaking lesbian film — a sharp, funny, humane, and deeply political portrait of older lesbians navigating a world that has never quite had a place for them. A lesbian thriller about what happens when the revolution doesn’t deliver, when lesbian relationships calcify, and when the past refuses to stay buried. Essential queer women’s cinema.