Eighteen-year-old Rustem, unlike his business sister Madina, is lazy and inert, he looks at the world with cold eyes, hiding behind indifference and cruelty to others. Strange girl Miko timidly tries to destroy Rustem's "shell" with a fragile feeling of first love.

Spurred by his own postmodern musings and the growing inequality, corruption, and kill-or-be-killed ethic of post-Soviet Kazakhstan, a solitary philosophy student steers his directionless life toward the commission of a violent crime, which leads to growing guilt.