Cage explores our relationships with non-humans and with each other in the shadow of the climate emergency.

Thirteen-year-old George, obsessed with the ecological crisis, anguished about her parents’ divorce, needs her mother. Bobby, furious at George’s abusive father, overwhelmed with single parenthood, cleans compulsively and distances herself from George.

George catches a large black rat snake near the Hudson River and brings it home as a pet. Bobby demands that George release the snake, but George refuses and further provokes Bobby by enlisting her father to help her build a snake house in her bedroom. When George tells Bobby she might want to live with her father, Bobby’s anger explodes. She reveals difficult things to George about the divorce, grieves in her room and thus begins her journey back to her daughter.

The snake escapes in the house and George feels her own grief about the divorce and her inability to keep her pets alive. When the snake turns up in Bobby’s laundry basket, George realizes that keeping the unhappy snake enacts the “human supremacy” she accuses her mother of. Having won her mother back, George lets the snake go at the river.