The smuggling job goes wrong as the fog and the authorities close in. The crew's fear overwhelms its decency, and the migrants in the hold become a threat to be silenced. A real-life tragedy of suffocated migrants hangs over the film, and the plot echoes it with a deadly mishap below deck and the crew's attempts to hide what happened. Violence spreads among the crew themselves. Cheol-joo loses control, especially when he discovers Dong-sik has been hiding Hong-mae in the engine room. Dong-sik, the youngest, is left standing against the men who were once his family.
The ending is bleak and brutal. The film shows that the crew's earlier hypocritical kindness was conditional, and that the sea only reveals what was already there. I am not describing the final scenes in more specific detail than this, since my research did not return a full plot summary.