Lena Olin (The Unbearable Lightness of Being) in this film portrays a journalist who embarks on a series of articles about a maternity ward, despite her "aversion for small children and pregnant women." The object of her investigation, in fact, is a doctor with whom she has had an affair some fifteen years before, her motivations wholly personal, her goal perhaps impossible: to make a silent man talk. (Director Marianne Ahrne views A Matter of Life and Death as the second film in a trilogy, the first of which, Near and Far Away, was actually about a mute.) Just as Ahrne has chosen as her protagonist a woman for whom motherly feelings are virtually not-existent, the maternity ward stories that are interwoven with hers are not heartwarming, but rather, in some cases, tragic in their proximity to the deceits of everyday life. So our reporter, too, learns that, in the words of the filmmaker, "love has no safety net."