Ida is in her twenties and comes from a well-off family. One day she goes missing without a trace. Her lover, Sander, volunteers to be locked in an apartment so that Ida’s father and brother can question him. The fun-loving unemployed man’s intentions are inscrutable – he lives in pleasant memories about his and Ida’s romantic fatalism of the “us against the whole world” variety. In a tirade of questions and answers, Sander does not reveal the whole truth, becoming an unreliable narrator. But does he even have the answers? Or is Ida’s disappearance just “his story”?

Nominated for awards at film festivals in Rotterdam, Gothenburg, Las Palmas and elsewhere, Danish director Martin Skovbjerg’s film is a minefield of fragmented memories. It centres on the paradoxes of storytelling as it deals with the disappearance of Ida (played by Angela Bundalovic from Nicolas Winding Refn’s Copenhagen Cowboy, 2022). Working with Oscar-nominated Norwegian screenwriter Eskil Vogt (co-screenwriter of The Worst Person in the World, 2021, and with a long-standing collaboration with its director Joachim Trier), the film is structured in a branching, misleading, elliptical way. Gradually, in this mystery of feelings, memories, and traumas, all the unknown dimensions of the choices of the two fragile lovers are revealed.