Elisabeth Manninen (Maria Schrader) is a writer who loses her husband in a traffic accident and is left to bring up their three children alone. Plunged into a state of deep depression, she wants to follow her husband into death and looks for a way to do so in the icy wastes of Lapland, where she got to know him many years before. On the way there she finds the corpse of an old woman near a single-settler plot of land. At first rather reluctantly, she begins to uncover ever more traces of the dead woman’s life, a story which the viewer now experiences on a second time level parallel to Elisabeth’s story. It is the story of the radical, unusual love between Aron (Thomas Kretschmann) the tramp, who wanders aimlessly through the world as a penitent haunted by a dark secret, and Ina (Julia Jentsch), who has been badly treated by her father since childhood, and by whom she is also misused after her mother dies. The grief and strength of the love shared by Ina and Aron, who try to conquer their suffering together, helps Elisabeth to find her way back to her own life, back to her children.