A Dutch couple, Maarten and Vera Klein, retired from their Canadian jobs, live quietly in an isolated house on the outskirts of Halifax. Snow covers their world. Inside, winter has set in as well, as Vera has begun to notice bizarre behavior in her husband-forgetting, wandering, disappearing in mind and body. But Mind Shadows is not about Vera; it is about Maarten, as he experiences the onset of Alzheimer's disease. That is this fiction film's originality and its courage. Honigmann honors the subject by having no sentimental flourishes, and offering no respite from Maarten's point of view, thoughtfully put forth by actor Joop Admiraal. For Maarten, thought itself is a cruel poetry of new experience as he finds words for how it is now. Every day has “holes” in it, and something leaks out. Yet, what seems a forgetting is very much a remembering; it's just that Maarten now exists out of time and context. As winter progresses to no good end, memory melts into fantasy.