Life in the Wangel household may be predictable, but it is not happy. Ellida Wangel, the second wife of Dr. Edvard Wangel and step-mother to his two daughters, Bolette and Hilde is all but absent from their day-to-day lives, preferring to spend her time swimming in the waters of the fjord than spending it with her adopted children. Bolette is left to manage her mischievous younger sister and the household affairs by herself, while Wangel takes care of his patients.

When Wangel invites Arnholm, Bolette’s old tutor and Ellida’s friend to visit them in their small fjord town in northern Norway, his presence, paired with that of a young, sickly but ambitious sculptor, Lyngstrand, upsets the family’s unhappy status quo. The instability of their home life is made all the worse by the unexpected arrival of a strange man from Ellida’s past, whose eyes still haunt her. These three visitors, intentionally or not, force the women of the family to decide, each for herself, which is more important: her duty to her family, or her duty to herself.