[4] The film follows a Hollywood actress whose rising career is cut short when an influenza pandemic sends her back to the small town she fled years before.

Ava Boone is an actress who plays the lead in a television show called She Wolf while living in Los Angeles, CA.

The film opens as the world is suffering under an extremely deadly flu pandemic with air traffic and international travel being shut down.

Kelly is able to charter a private plane to fly them to their rural hometown in Delmont, South Dakota to escape the plague.

While Ava's past is never fully explained, it is heavily implied that she ran away from home in her late teens and Kelly followed her to Los Angeles.

The family is fairly self-sufficient with their own water, food stores, gasoline generator, and solar power panels unlike others in the area.

While leaving, Ava is spotted by her abusive father, Jasper Boone, who becomes hostile and demands that she return to the family home.

Sometime later, Ava is hiding at the rundown house after escaping her captors but she is quickly recaptured after inadvertently hitching a ride with a flu-infected woman.

Upon arriving at the rundown house, Ava prepares to leave but begins coughing blood, a sign of flu infection.

The crew shot 11 days on two family farms near the small towns of Delmont and Letcher, South Dakota.

Once they wrapped the winter, the whole team took a few months off to regroup, and returned in July, 2019 to film in the intense South Dakota summer.

Director Charlie Buhler said in an interview, "We fought to make this movie because we felt that there was a very specific expectation about the types of stories women were able to tell.

"[5] Jenna Lyng Adams, added, "Growing up in Minnesota, I've always been drawn to stories about remote communities and places.

"[12] Dark Sky Films' Nicola Goelzhaeuser said, "Before the Fire arrives as the world is caught in an existential crisis, but it is really a timeless achievement that reveals how far people will go to survive.