Birgit Unterweger

While Christine tries in vain to get her mute daughter to speak again, an unexpected encounter occurs. She meets Leonore and feels attracted to the woman. Driven by the duties of family life, Christine becomes increasingly conscious of how her own speechlessness prevents her from expressing herself and her desires.

The story of two people going through crises coincides with the reality of the last sanatorium of its kind. For over 100 years, people have come to this place in the hope of being cured. So do Nina and Henri, both in mid-life, burnt out, and from different backgrounds. Their paths cross between the dining room and therapy, at a time when they are struggling to find their inner peace. Then the place is snowed in and everything becomes slow and quiet. The ghosts and stories from the long corridors become their companions. While the two read each other the riot act and try to forget their loneliness, a historian digs through the house archives for documents from the early days of the sanatorium. She researches the sanatorium as a focal point of the modern history of exhaustion and traces a narrative from neurasthenia to the inner restlessness of the present for her dissertation. The house becomes a setting for an archaeology of exhaustion.