A young woman seeks out a father she has never known, only to discover a man more comfortable with alcohol than with humanity, in Vlácil's potent psychological drama set in a wintry landscape as desolate as that of his earlier Markéta Lazarová. Orphaned after her mother dies, and reluctant to rely on her boyfriend's snobbish relatives, Vladka journeys to a remote village to find her absentee father, busy drinking himself to death between snow storms and engineering jobs. Veering between awkward and tender, hopeless and promising, their burgeoning relationship both flourishes and withers within the one constant of the father's alcoholism. Separating an outside world of ice and snow from the warm interiors of taverns, Vlácil subtly underlines the limited choices of a man resigned to a hopelessness possibly caused by society, but rarely cured by it.