Mike is released from a mental institution and finds himself in a filthy room and board where dreams and reality are one. A moving depiction of mental illness and a scathing indictment of the impersonal health care system.

While their mother is dying in the modern Gimli, Manitoba hospital, two young children are told an important tale by their Icelandic grandmother about Einar the lonely, his friend Gunnar, and the angelic Snjofrieder in a Gimli of old.

At the height of the October Revolution during the 1919 allied intervention in Arkhangelsk, the exploits of one-legged Canadian soldier Lt. John Boles are told, after he is taken in from the cold by a dysfunctional Russian family and mistakes a local woman for his presumed dead lover.

A reclusive seeker-of-immortality scientifically keeps his body youthful, but is not able to control the devastating effects of aging on his mind. He wanders about his creaky estate; quoting scripture, taking mind-altering drugs, engaging in bizarre rituals and vaguely interacting with his dysfunctional family...until, of course, the inevitable blood-soaked climax.