Aloys Adorn, Georg Friedrich, is a cold, distant private investigator who once worked with his recently deceased father. He never takes a personal approach, preferring to film his subjects from a distance with his video camera. He loathes human contact, routinely ignoring the residents of his apartment, especially the woman next door who has tried to ask him for help on several occasions.
On the bus ride home from the funeral, a despondent Aloys drinks himself into unconsciousness. When he wakes up the next morning, still aboard the bus, he discovers that his camera and the tapes of his subjects are missing, a disquieting void that unsettles him more than any ordinary loss would. The absence of the captured lives he’s spent years recording unsettles his sense of control and purpose, nudging him toward an unpredictable thread of events.
A short time later, a female voice calls him on the telephone. She reveals that she stole his tapes, watched them, and intends to send them to the people he has filmed. Aloys threatens to involve the police, but the threat proves hollow; the caller uses wit and misdirection to stay one step ahead, taunting him and exploiting his need to outthink her. He pursues the clues, trying to unmask the caller, only to find that each attempt circles back to a trap he didn’t anticipate.
During one call, the mysterious woman offers a bargain: in exchange for the tapes, Aloys must participate in a "telephone hike"—a ritual where both voices visualize a shared location and imagine conversing within that imagined space. After some hesitation, Aloys agrees and travels this strange, intimate terrain with her, embarking on an imagined walk through the woods that feels almost real in its sensory detail.
When he tries to initiate additional telephone hikes, the caller grows frustrated and abruptly ends the conversations, leaving Aloys with a growing sense of vulnerability and exposure. Then, returning home one evening, he discovers his unconscious neighbor being loaded into an ambulance. The clues he has gathered during his attempts to identify the caller begin to converge, and a troubling revelation emerges: the neighbor is Vera, the same woman he has repeatedly ignored, the same Vera who has long lingered on the edge of his perception.
It turns out that Vera is a zookeeper who once kept exotic animals; she had lost her job after a sheep kidnapping incident and had attempted suicide. The news of her condition complicates Aloys’s feelings in surprising ways, and he finds himself volunteering to water her flowers and feed her iguana as he wrestles with guilt, guilt about his own detachment, and a growing, uneasy curiosity about the person behind the door.
Days pass, and Vera, now hospitalized, texts Aloys to thank him for looking after her belongings. Spurred by this small connection, Aloys resumes the telephone hikes, though now they carry a different cadence and meaning. Vera hesitantly agrees to participate, and the two begin a series of increasingly intimate exchanges that blur the line between observer and participant. Aloys invites her into a shared virtual space—a tour of his apartment to host a digital party that would include all the people he has watched or encountered in his investigations. The imagined world expands as they travel, through the phone, to his favorite restaurant for a pretend dinner with Vera, and even to the zoo where Vera once worked, with her guiding him through a phone-led tour of the surroundings.
One day, the real Vera, on leave from the hospital, appears at Aloys’s door. He cannot bring himself to let her in, enthralled by the imagined version he has built and still fearful of genuine human contact. She leaves, visibly hurt, and returns to the hospital. The shock of seeing the real Vera disappoints him enough to compel a change; moved by the ache of this moment, he follows her to the hospital, quietly sneaking into her room that night and sleeping on the floor beside her bed. In that quiet vigil, Aloys confronts the intertwined pull of memory, imagination, and the painful possibility of human connection finally breaking through his carefully constructed distance.
