During their childhood, Hanna and Clarissa were best friends. They spent every vacation together in an old summer house on a small island. Shortly after Hanna’s 9th birthday, they suddenly lost touch and only meet again unexpectedly 25 years later. Hanna is now married, has a seven-year-old daughter and is the chief resident physician at the hospital where she reunites with Clarissa. Her old friend has been brought to the hospital ER for overdosing on sleeping pills. The two women pick up their friendship where they left off and spontaneously decide to spend a few days on the island, just like in the old days. When Hanna learns that Maria, a playmate of hers from the island’s village, disappeared as a child and was never seen or heard from again, she begins to search in the past. Something horrible must have happened on the island and they must have been involved.
Acting
Tander and de Boer's brittle chemistry crackles with unspoken history.
Cinematography
The island's gray isolation becomes a character — beautiful and suffocating.
Director
Alex Schmidt
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Director Alex Schmidt developed the screenplay for six years, inspired by a documentary about childhood amnesia and real cases of recovered memory controversies in 1990s Germany.
The film deliberately mirrors the structure of traumatic memory itself — nonlinear, sensory-driven, and refusing to resolve cleanly. That frustrating ambiguity IS the point.
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