Cheap Thrills takes place over the course of a single weekend, beginning with the incessantly stoned Ethan and his roommate Phil discovering the body of their weed dealer in a Vancouver alley alongside a box of porno magazines and crime noir paperbacks. Tasked by his eccentric boss with locating the money the dealer had been carrying, gang member Wynne Duncan is led to the two roommates. But things don't add up—for anybody. Cheap Thrills is about Vancouver, weed, lust, crime stories, a missing bag of money, an American conspiracy to invade Canada, and the death of a drug smuggler. It is a paranoid crime-noir love story, where the love is unreciprocated and the noir is mostly in the mind.