The injured Susan and husband Richard are then stranded in a small desert town waiting for help to arrive as the U.S. government overreacts. With Morocco being a Muslim country that depends on Western tourists, the authorities are eager go on terrorist alert.

This indefinitely prevents Susan and Richard - for whom this vacation was supposed to patch up their shaky marriage – from returning to Southern California. Meanwhile, back home, the couple's kids – Mike (Nathan Gamble) and Debbie (Elle Fanning) – are in the care of Amelia (Adriana Barraza), their longtime nanny. The shooting delays their return long enough that Amelia is going to have to forgo her son’s wedding in Mexico to look after the kids. Her solution is to take the kids with her for the one-day excursion to Tijuana with her irresponsible cousin (Gael García Bernal) at the wheel insisting that he's sober enough to drive. No good will come of this.

Meanwhile, there's another story brewing in Tokyo, with a much more unsubstantiated plot connection to the others that isn’t made apparent until near the end of the film. It centers on a young deaf-mute woman named Chieko (Rinko Kikuchi) who is grappling with the loss of her mother by suicide, desperately craving romantic or sexual validation, and her quietly exasperated, widower father (Kôji Yakusho).