In a strange city where every person seems content beyond reason a new man arrives in town and stirs up trouble by asking too many questions.
Forty-year-old Andreas arrives in a strange city with no memory of how he got there. He is presented with a job, an apartment - even a wife. But before long, Andreas notices that something is wrong. Andreas makes an attempt to escape the city, but he discovers there's no way out. Andreas meets Hugo, who has found a crack in a wall in his cellar. Beautiful music streams out from the crack. Maybe it leads to "the other side"? A new plan for escape is hatched.—Tordenfilm AS
Andreas Ramsfjell (Trond Fausa Aurvaag) stands on a subway station platform waiting for a train. The station is deserted save for a young couple, a short distance from Andreas, who French kiss in the most un-erotic and artificial manner one can imagine. Noticing them, Andreas can't escape the overwhelming feeling he has of utter depressing wretchedness - yet, escape he must. As a train arrives he calmly steps off the platform into its path.
Out of a white emptiness, it is as if Andreas has been pulled from the womb as he arrives at a deserted way station in the middle of nowhere, on a coach on which he is the sole passenger. Let off the coach, he is left standing like a bewildered innocent abroad. A white handwritten banner above the station welcomes him. Very perfunctory, a middle aged man with a ladder appears and takes down the banner. Andreas introduces himself. The man cheerfully informs him that he is expected and that he is there to drive him into town.
They drive through an impossibly picturesque countryside to Andreas's new place, a modern low-rise apartment block. The man hands Andreas the keys to the furnished apartment along with an envelope containing details of his new job as an accountant with a firm of contractors down town. He departs telling Andreas: "You'll get used to it."
At work the next day in his swish, glittering city office Andreas is greeted as if everyone has been expecting him, but he encounters his first discordant note when on his lunch break he sees, in the street, a man impaled on railings, having jumped to his death. A well-drilled team of street cleaners arrive and proceed to remove the body without any passers-by even batting an eye.
The next day Andreas, disturbed by the lack of emotion and inability to experience sensation shown by those around him, accidentally-on-purpose cuts off the end of his finger on a guillotine at work. He passes out with the pain. However, by the time he arrives home and removes the bandage, his finger has miraculously regenerated.
He decides to go back to the way station where he first arrived. On seeing the coach that brought him to the city he tries to follow this in his car but can't keep up. Arriving at the place where the coach disappeared from his view he sees tyre tracks that come to an abrupt stop, as if the coach simply disappeared into thin air. Returning to the office Andreas resolves to try harder to fit in.
At a dinner party he meets a beautiful woman, Anne Britt (Petronella Barker), who sells kitchen interiors for a living. They start seeing each other and Andreas moves in with her. It isn't long however, before the soullessness of this relationship and everything else begins again to weigh heavy on Andreas. He tries talking about his disconnection with the sterile utopia, devoid of children, the old, animals, and any diversity of ethnicity, creed or colour but finds this is met with universal denial and disquiet on the part of all with whom he would broach the subject. All that is save the lone voice of Hugo (Per Schaaning), a cleaner, who pipes up from a stall in the men's room of a club, one night, ranting about the feeble potency of the alcohol and food and hot chocolate having no taste.
Seeking more than a mere superficial human connection Andreas's attentions eventually turn to Ingeborg (Birgitte Larsen), a co-worker in his office. Following a series of dates with Ingeborg, Andreas believes that he has found this. He surprises her over dinner, one evening, with the news that he has left Anne for her. However, it is Andreas's turn to be surprised when Ingeborg confesses that she had never thought of their relationship as serious, although that said she could, she supposed, dump her string of other lovers and move in with him as this would mean an upgrade to a bathtub instead of making do with the shower at her own place. Andreas is utterly devastated; he gets up from the table and without a word leaves her in the restaurant.
Once again finding himself at the subway station, Andreas tries to kill himself. Run over and hit by several trains he succeeds only in surviving this latest suicide bid. Battered and bloodied he returns home to Anne, who is pleased to learn that a joint invitation in their social calendar, to go go-karting is still on.
One evening while passing the home of Hugo, the fellow dissident he had briefly encountered at the club, Andreas hears a lilting and affecting music coming from a cellar window. He gains entry to the building and knocks on a door answered by Hugo. Warily and very reluctantly Hugo lets him in. In a room dripping with artificial lighting, Hugo shows Andreas the small light to another world that emanates from a hole in the wall. From this tiny fissure, long banished olfactory and auditory sensations waft into the room: the two men drink this in. Andreas becomes determined to break through to the source.
The pair tunnel through solid rock for days and are just on the point of breaking through completely to the other side when they are seized by the authorities. Hugo is released after recanting and begging to stay. Andreas is forcibly expelled from the city for his disruptive influence. He is bundled into the baggage bay of the coach on which he first arrived and driven off to a frozen waste where he is abandoned.
