At a summer-evening dance a young girl meets a man who tells her he is a doctor. They go off together, and after that she never sees him again. She learns that she is pregnant and inquires about him at various hospitals, with no success. She reads of his engagement and becomes acquainted with another girl with a situation like her own.

1953 film by Alf Sjöberg

Traveling through an unnamed European country on the brink of war, sickly, intellectual Ester, her sister Anna and Anna's young son, Johan, check into a near-empty hotel. A basic inability to communicate among the three seems only to worsen during their stay. Anna provokes her sister by enjoying a dalliance with a local man, while the boy, left to himself, has a series of enigmatic encounters that heighten the growing air of isolation.