The Gates follows three college students -- Derek, Kevin, and Tyon (Gooding, Smith, and Powers) on a road trip gone wrong, as the three young men take an ill-advised shortcut through a remote gated community, where they find themselves trapped behind the walls after witnessing a murder. Over the course of the night, they find themselves blamed, hunted, and fractured by their own differing belief systems, while the perpetrator—James Van Der Beek, at his most charming and terrifying—emerges as the cunning patriarch that holds the entire community under his influence.