Helsinki, spring 1975: Author Jeanette Aspen arrives at the Lapinlahti hospital, one of the oldest mental hospitals in the world. She is there to meet her only child, psychiatrist Karin Aspen, 36 years, after sending her to Sweden as a war child at the start of the Winter War in 1939 as she herself had travelled to Spain to begin a new life. The encounter opens a drama between the mother and daughter, complete strangers to each other. The architectural beauty of the mental hospital serves as an eyewitness to a series of events in which emotions locked up for too long will splash out between the women.