A young Catholic priest is taken to an isolated house where an IRA group is holding a suspected informer awaiting execution. He locks himself in a room with the victim and the terrorists are now faced with the possibility of having to kill a priest.

An unlikely kind of friendship develops between Fergus, an Irish Republican Army volunteer, and Jody, a kidnapped British soldier lured into an IRA trap by another IRA member. When the hostage-taking ends up going horribly wrong, Fergus escapes and heads to London, where he seeks out Jody's lover, a hairdresser named Dil. Fergus changes his name and gets a job as a day laborer. His starts seeing Dil, who knows nothing about Fergus' real background....

Taking place largely over the course of one tense night, Carol Reed's psychological noir, set in an unnamed Belfast, stars James Mason as Johnny McQueen, a revolutionary ex-con leading a robbery that goes horribly wrong. Injured and hunted by the police, he seeks refuge throughout the city, while the woman he loves (Kathleen Ryan) searches for him among the shadows.

In a remote Irish village, a damaged Finbar is forced to fight for redemption after a lifetime of sins, but what price is he willing to pay? In the land of saints and sinners, some sins can't be buried.