Two emotionally estranged sisters, Ester and Anna, and Anna's 10-year-old son Johan, are on a night train journey back home. Ingrid Thulin plays Ester, the older sister and a serious literary translator, while Gunnel Lindblom portrays Anna, and Jörgen Lindström takes the role of Johan. The trio decides to interrupt their journey in Timoka, a town in a fictional Central European country teetering on the edge of war, hoping to catch a breath of safety. Although Ester is a professional translator, neither sister nor son knows the local language well, which adds to the sense of dislocation and vulnerability as they cross this borderland moment.
They find shelter in a two-room apartment inside a once-grand hotel, now worn by time and memory. Ester endures pain and fatigue, choosing vodka and cigarettes as a thin shield while she tries to work. Johan begins to wander the hotel’s dim corridors, meeting the elderly porter and a traveling troupe of Spanish dwarfs who perform in the lobby. Anna ventures into the city, where she is openly pressed upon by a waiter in a café, then watches a theater show that sits mostly empty, witnessing a nearby couple begin to have sex. She returns to the café, brushes past the waiter, and eventually goes back to the hotel, carrying the weight of what she has seen and felt.
Left alone with Johan for stretches, Ester attempts a warmer closeness with him, but the boy instinctively resists her touch and seeks distance. When Anna returns to the room, Ester asks for a full account of Anna’s fleeting activities, and Anna, hungry for mischief and control, fabricates a sexual encounter with the waiter to her sister. She also reveals plans to meet the man again that very evening. Ester, fearing isolation and still trying to hold some form of dignity, pleads with her sister not to leave her alone.
Anna meets the man again in the hotel, and Johan witnesses them sharing a kiss and stepping into a room down the hall. The morning light finds Ester growing weaker, her body wracked by painful spasms as she fights for breath. An elderly porter offers quiet comfort, and Ester confesses both her fear of death and a deep loathing for sexual contact. When Johan returns to say goodbye, Ester hands him a note. After he and Anna board the train, Johan reads the title on the note: "To Johan – words in a foreign language." Anna pulls the window open and lets the rain wash over the scene as Johan continues to read, the weight of the night lingering in the quiet of the room.
> poor Anna
In the quiet aftermath, the story lingers on the ache of illness, the fragility of family ties, and the pull between desire, guilt, and care. The hotel, Timoka, and the war‑skirted horizon become backdrops for a restrained drama about love’s limits and the ways people cling to one another when life narrows to a single, breathless moment. The film remains intimate and unflinching, presenting a portrait of two sisters whose competing desires—and Ester’s mortal illness—force a painful reckoning that neither can fully escape.
