Jerome Carceville finds it impossible to resist such an email from one of the top head-hunting firms in the world. He responds, and after undergoing a variety of searching interviews and psychometric tests, he is eventually selected for a decisive and final examination. The fifteen talented and driven finalists arrive at a hotel on an island in the middle of an Alpine lake. Only two of them have a realistic chance of being offered the job, and when Del Rieco, the 'games-master' informs them that the nature of the contest is simulated economic warfare and that the competitors must be eliminated, it becomes clear that this is no ordinary recruitment drive. What seems to start as a simple team-building exercise soon becomes a horrifying and bloody battle for supremacy.