After the tragic deaths of his parents in 1930s Great Depression-set America, Jacob Jankowski (Robert Pattinson), a final-year Ivy League veterinary medicine student, jumps on a moving train and into a life with a traveling circus, headed by the troubled, tyrannical August (Christoph Waltz). The circus master’s wife Marlena (Reese Witherspoon) is the troupe’s human star attraction (the other one’s a horse at the start of the story, which dies and is replaced by a cheeky elephant), and she can’t help but tease Jankowski’s heartstrings. Complications ensue.