A teenager is found murdered, and the examining doctor recognizes her son's knife. The film works its way back to reveal how this situation came about; a rare treatment of the taboo subject of youth criminality in Socialist society.

The actors Martin and Maria have not been a couple for a long time, but they didn't get very far without each other. While he spends his time with alcohol, numerous affairs and reveries about his own film, she is bored with her young lover. When Maria surprisingly finds the loot of a bank robbery in the trash, she takes the opportunity to get rid of her lover, only to run into her ex-husband shortly afterwards. The old passion flares up again and Martin suddenly sees the chance to finally realize his long-held script.

Claudia and Georg Rattey, a married couple, have everything what people in their mid-thirties might wish for: a car, a farmhouse for vacations on the weekends, and their son Oliver. But their contentedness does not turn into happiness but into an inner void: Claudia and Georg have nothing left to say to each other and just live alongside each other. One day, they discover a ten-year old burglar in their half-finished vacation home.