On Saint Lucia's day, the happy life of a young Swedish family is disturbed by an unexpected phone call. Leena learns that her mother, with whom she's been broken for years, is dying and wants to say goodbye. Johan understands only up to a certain point the disturbance of his wife and, despite the many resistances, convinces her to leave with the two little girls to reach their unknown grandmother, hospitalized at 600 km away.
The return to Ystad awakens in Leena memories of a childhood full of pain. The parents, immigrants from Finland, were a poor but also close-knit couple until the alcohol had taken over, weighing not so much on little Leena, already very strong and mature despite her young age, as on her little brother Sakari.
Sakari, as revealed only in the last dramatic dialogue between Leena and his mother, was taken from the family by the social services and entrusted to an orphanage. He died years later, forgotten, of an overdose. Leena has always borne remorse with her for not having done enough for her brother, but above all does not forgive her parents for having lost a child like that, almost uninterested in it.
Returning from the hospital, still upset, the woman first inexplicably yells at her daughters, then lashes out at her husband in an irrational impetus that is very similar to the many scenes of violence experienced by a spectator when she was a child. Known as the mother's death, she melts into a liberating cry, returns to herself and embraces her patient and understanding husband and her beloved daughters.
