The Silence

Two emotionally estranged sisters, Ester and Anna, travel home on a night train while Ester's illness casts a shadow over the journey. They decide to interrupt the trip in the next town, Timoka, in a country whose language neither sister speaks. The plan hints at a temporary refuge from their strained relationship and Ester's deteriorating condition.

They disembark in Timoka and rent a two-room apartment in a once-grand hotel. Ester stays in her room, trying to work as a translator while self-medicating with vodka and cigarettes. Anna moves through the hotel and city, quietly shouldering the burden of Ester's illness.

Left in the care of Ester, Johan begins wandering the hotel's hallways. He encounters the elderly hotel porter and a traveling troupe of Spanish dwarfs, blurring the line between confinement and curiosity in the strange hotel world.

Anna ventures into the city where a cafe waiter openly advances on her. She then attends a sparsely attended theatre show and watches a nearby young couple begin to have sex, experiencing repulsion and fascination in equal measure. She returns to the cafe and then back to the hotel.

With Anna out, Ester tries to form a closer bond with Johan, but the boy instinctively avoids her attempts to stroke his hair and face. The moment underscores the widening emotional distance between the sisters and Ester's isolation in her own body.

Upon Anna's return, Ester asks for a frank account of her sister's evening. In a provocative act, Anna fabricates a sexual encounter with the waiter to unsettle Ester and reveals her intention to meet him again that night.

Anna meets the waiter again in the hotel, and Johan witnesses them kissing and entering a room down the hall. The boy's quiet observation reveals a gulf between the adults and the fragility of family ties in the hotel’s corridors.

Ester begs to join Anna and her lover in the room, but Anna orders her to leave. Ester's lingering loneliness exposes the depth of her fear of death and the complexity of their mother-daughter bond, while Anna lashes out in anger, calling attention to their fraught past, even muttering 'poor Anna' in a provocative moment.

Anna's lover advances again; Anna’s laughter gives way to sobs, revealing a deeper emotional collapse beneath the surface of their affair. The scene crystallizes the unresolved resentments and tenderness that haunt the sisters.

In the morning, Anna announces that she and Johan will leave the hotel after breakfast. Ester deteriorates with painful spasms, and the elderly porter returns to offer comfort and humanity in her final hours of vitality.

When Johan returns to say goodbye, Ester gives him a note. After Anna and Johan board the train, Johan reads the note's title: 'To Johan – words in a foreign language', hinting at a farewell language he will understand later.

As the train departs, Anna opens a window and cools herself with the outside rain while Johan continues to read Ester's foreign-language words. The moment lingers on the gap between the sisters and the boy's curiosity about language and memory.