A middle-class family from a small town. The father is a lecturer, the mother is a thorough housewife, the eldest daughter is going to start the university and the youngest son goes to high school and is learning piano.

The apparently normality of the family is broken when the mother starts an ambiguous love-hate relationship with her son that is unbearable for the him. It is not child ill-treatment, but an incisive study of the conflictive psychology of a mother and the defensive desperate reaction of her son.